Thanks for investing in your child and signing them up for summer swim team. Our approach is two fold. The coaches and the board want to provide a healthy fun environment for new swimmers to learn about competitive swimming as well as improve their skills. In addition, provide a healthy fun environment for the accomplished swimmer to compete and fine-tune their swimming skills. The four cornerstones of our program are: Do your best in meets and practice. Show good sportsmanship to competitors and officials. Have phenomenal team spirit and to have fun doing it. You play an important part in their competitive swimming development. Here are some areas you can impact. Getting your swimmer to practices and meets on time Encouraging them through tough times Not expecting best times every meet Encouraging your swimmer to try different events Being proud of them win, lose or disqualified Communicating issues or concerns with the coaching staff or the board Volunteering your time at swim meets Not leaving the meet early without informing a coach Getting on line with them and review the website If you have a concern or question, we want to hear from you. But we ask one favor of you. Please do not do this during practice. We have so little pool time; we want to focus our complete attention on the swimmers during practice. We can always discuss issues before or after the practice session, via email or phone. We will be glad to schedule an appointment to sit down and discuss any aspect of our program and encourage it with new Stingray families. One thing you need to know about swimming. Sometimes your swimmer’s performance does not make sense. For many new swimmers, their times will drop every time they swim a specific event. This is great but probably will not continue forever. Do to how we train some swimmer will have a fast time at the beginning of the summer and then their times go up until the last meet of the year. At least that’s what we are trying to accomplish. In some cases, your swimmer’s time will go up because we are changing their stroke or correcting certain bad habits, eventually these changes will improve their time. But times are very unpredictable and we don’t always know why thing happen the way they do. Times do not always reflect the amount of effort your swimmer is putting in. If you have concerns do not hesitate to contact one of the coaches. A note on DQ’s. Many times your swimmer will make it through the first couple of meets and not get disqualified. The when they swim at the Invitational they do get disqualified even though their stroke looks no different to you than the first meets. In addition in the larger meets there is not always time for the officials to discuss the reason for the DQ. Officials are trained when the violation is questionable the benefit of the doubt goes to the swimmer. But as with anything involving human judgment mistakes can be made. In our experience with the officials at NGSL meets, they have been more than fair with all swimmers in the league. Regardless, as mentioned above, a Stingray ALWAYS shows good sportsmanship to competitors and officials. Therefore we always abide by the decisions of the meet officials. We expect our Stingray parents to do the same. A formal complaint can be lodged with the head official in exceptional cases. Parents are what makes swim teams go!! So we need your help as meet volunteers. The Stingray family has always led the way when it comes to volunteers. We are very proud of our parent’s support when it comes to meet volunteers. There is no experience necessary to be a timer. It is the best seat in the house and timers are usually well taken care of by the host team. Please help continue the tradition of leading the league in team support, volunteer to help at dual and sanctioned meets. Thanks again for investing in your child and joining the Stingray family. I believe you as well as your swimmer will get a tremendous return for your investment. As always, you input, questions and concerns are always welcome by the coaches as well as board members.