It was a breakout season for the Elmira District Secondary School’s swimming team, which saw enrollment triple from last year along with a number of strong performances at regional meets.
![The Elmira District Secondary School swim team. Back row: coach Pam Germann, Ellen Siebel-Achenbach, Avery Klooster, Stephanie Ball, Megan Parrott, Jordan Shantz, Emma Bader and coach Sandra Jardim. Front row: Hannah Cornies, Elena McKee, Brianna Stevanus, Taylor Duench and Mercedes Weber. Members not present: Joanna Bannon, Charly Bax, Dannah Bax, Brandon Berchtold, Wesley Bond, Donavan Bourgoin, Brooklyn Bowman, Erika Morrison, Sarah Narcott, Ben Schott, John Wang, Maddie Wang, Hannah Weber and Alexis Windatt. [Scott Barber / The Observer]](https://www.observerxtra.com/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/post_sports_swim.jpg)
“It has been a great year for our group,” coach Sandra Jardim said. “We went from about 10 swimmers last season to over 30 this year. And more importantly, they are a really great group of students.”
On February 12, the top swimmers took part in the Central Western Ontario Secondary Schools Association championships at the Wilmot Recreation Centre.
And the results were remarkable.
Jordan Shantz won first place in the senior girls’ freestyle with a time of 29.96 seconds, while also picking up a pair of seconds in the 100-metre freestyle (1:08.41) and 50-metre butterfly (35.24). The two freestyle times were good enough to book Shantz a ticket to the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) final meet – the province’s highest level for high school sports – on March 3-4 at the Etobicoke Olympian.
Other CWOSSA finishes included fifth place for the girls’ open 200-metre medley relay team (2:32:29) featuring Hannah Cornies, Ellen Siebel-Achenbach, Megan Parrott and Shantz. Brooklyn Bowman also picked up a sixth place finish in the junior girls’ 100-metre freestyle with a time of 1:21:41.
For coach Pam Germann, the finishes are a testament to the hard work the team put in all year long.
“We’ve been practicing three times a week, two in the pool (at the Woolwich Memorial Centre) and one dry land session, since November,” she said. “There isn’t a lot of time to train for WCSSAA so our focus was to get their endurance up, because if their endurance is strong then they can swim even if they’re using slightly less effective stroke technique, they can still go further, or faster, before they start getting tired. And then, later on, we would split the team up into a couple different groups to work on the different strokes, butterfly, breaststroke, freestyle and backstroke, and the biggest thing with kids is that a lot of them can swim from swimming lessons or a swim at the beach, so they have the basics down, but things like how to do dives and flip turns and pushing off the wall and making sure they are streamlined are things that they might never have thought about before.”
And it helped that a dedicated group of four teachers got onboard (Jardim and Germann, along with Dave Conlon and Laurie Murray), Germann added.
“It has been a great experience this season and we’re looking forward to seeing the program continue to grow here at EDSS.”
