Fargo North Girls swim&dive off to successful start

By Griffin Thurston

The Fargo North Girls Swim and Dive season is in full swing, and with that comes thousands of yards swam, hundreds of starts and turns, many team meetings, and at least once a week boot camps.
Boot camp is a full body ‘land’ workout that gets put on by Allison Hoeg and Annie Grande every Tuesday at Fargo North, right outside of the pool.
Each session lasts for around an hour and is very up-tempo and intense, while electrifying music is blared through the speaker while the instructors keep everyone engaged by complimenting everyone by saying how well everyone’s doing.
Workouts include different cardio workouts such as the agility ladder, way too many push-ups, burpees, and different exercises the girls didn’t even know existed. On the first day, the instructors told everyone to go at their own pace, but the coaches wanted 100%. The end goal is to work muscles that don’t usually get worked on that forces your body to explode and be intense which is key in swimming.
When asked about why she added boot camp to the itinerary, “Boot camp shows who’s your outside leaders are and can show the strengths of the team and help them.” Said Butery.
The workouts have been challenging. “I don’t really want to move, it hurts really bad to move,” said senior Lydia Smith. The sentiment is shared.
Junior Eric Meier, a manager for the team, is also sore from the boot camp workouts. Even though he doesn’t swim, assistant coach Dick Fisher instructed him to participate in the activity.
“It was really bad, and I hate going up steps because it hurts so bad, it hurts too much to walk around and I assume I look dumb as I try to walk from class to class,” Meier said.
The boot camps seem to be helping in the swimmers physical success. So far, the season has been very successful. After a fourth-place finish at the 2018 Spartan Invite, they went on to win the FN vs. Shanley Wahpeton meet, and the 2018 Quad against Grand Forks Central, Fargo South, and Grand Forks Red River.
Most notably, senior Megan Manly took first place in the 100 Butterfly and took third place in the 100 breaststroke at the Quad. This is even more impressive when you take into consideration she was racing a combined 27 other swimmers in the two events.
Coach Talia is proud of the progress they’ve made “[we are] doing well right now, lots of work to do on small mistakes, but we keep improving everyday.” Said Butery. The captains also touched on the subject, saying that theres a lot of new kids and a lot of improvement has been made
Fargo North graduated two seniors last year, Anna Astrup and Alex Rasmussen. Astrup was their best butterflier and won the 100m butterfly at state.
Without Astrup and Rasmussen, the team is looking for leaders to push the team, and the seniors are doing just that.
By leading cheers and getting everyone ready for the meet, seniors swimmers Smith, Manly, Madison Engler, and diver Selena Sanchez are leading the charge. It is great for the diversity of the team to have a senior diver as they can support all the different aspects of events, as well as cheering everyone on while they suffer together through boot camp.
A couple of the swimmers and divers have siblings that are also on the team, senior Smith is joined by her freshman sister Collette. The two have been swimming with each other for many years, both joining the North team in seventh grade, they’ve both had tons of time in the pool together, and always look forward to racing each other. Swimming together is something they are used to, and enjoy. “Its cool, thumbs up,” said Lydia.
Junior Cailey and freshman Carly Swanson are two divers on the team. Carly joined the team to swim this year, but was later dragged into diving,
Cailey has a lot of fun motivating her sister, “We can push each other and im more experienced so I can help her more.” said Swanson.
The Fargo North girls are hoping for a very strong finish to the season.