The SHS swim and dive team season has come to a close. Two team members competed in the final competition– the state competition. Mitchell Cadwell in diving and Victoria Khorishko in swimming. Coach David Perchinske gives his insight on the season below.
Q: How has this season been for the SHS swim and dive team?
A: Well, we made the best of a rough situation. Our pool has been closed at Solon High School since last March, so we’ve been forced to train at the Chagrin Valley Athletic Club Which is not super far or anything like that— the hours are later, so the students do have to adjust their eating habits, their studying habits, sleep habits, things like that. The numbers on the women’s side are just low, they have been, really since COVID, never really bounced back from that, but we’re hoping that changes here soon. And then, on the boys side, they’ve won every conference meet, they won the conference championship, they won the sectional meet. You know, they only lost three, I think dual meets, and all three were because we had kids that were out sick– around 3-5 boys. Otherwise, we would have won and been undefeated entirely, but we’re undefeated still in the conference.
Q: What is your definition of a successful season?
A: Well, I’m an ultra competitive person— as the swimmers know, but, setting that aside— the success criteria has to be redefined yearly. On the women’s side, with seven female swimmers, by numbers, we could win every event in a meet, and we’re still going to lose the meet. Because other teams could put four people in every event, so they can go two, three, four, five, and we can just go one. And first place that doesn’t win you the meet. So, you can’t define their success on the women’s side by wins and losses as a whole, so looking at the growth of the student athlete whether that’s kind of on the soft side or the dry side where it’s a maturity growth, you know, a maturation whether that’s just as a person or as an athlete. Certainly, we can look at individual times. Swimming is very much a team sport, but it’s also very much an individual sport. So, you can track your progress very easily from start to finish, and at this point in the season, every single person male or female, has had a lifetime best at some point.
Q: How does this season stand out compared to past seasons?
A: What’s different about this season is the composition of the team. Where on the boys side, there is no like, ‘this is the guy’- we have a bunch of guys that have contributed. And I’ve also noticed that there’s been no drama, which is a rarity. Generally, there’s probably some girl drama, but there hasn’t been this year, and we haven’t had any issues with the boys this year either. We’ve just kind of had the next man up mentality. I know that’s a cliche— and you hear the Browns say it all the time,–but that’s kind of what we did, and it seemed to work out pretty well so far.
Q: What was the biggest challenge of the season?
A: The biggest challenge for the team, it’s the after school schedule. They’re going to lift and then they have like 45 minutes off, and then they gotta go to the pool. If our pool is running, I manipulate the practice schedule, so we do mornings at 5 a.m., but on the flip side, you’re also now there till 8:30 at night. The other part of that facilities issue is if members come into CVAC [Chagrin Valley Athletic Club], we have to drop down to four lanes. And so, that can be difficult, especially when some boys are like 6 ‘4.
Q: Do swimmers and divers have off season training to prepare for next season?
A: You can’t make states anymore if you don’t swim year round. It’s just not gonna happen. If I’m the USA swimming club coach, which I am, I can train them year-round, every day, all day and there’s no penalty. So, I would say 8 out of 10 kids swim year round. Maybe not the whole year, but years past, we finished states on a Saturday and that Monday it’s club season. There is no break.
Q: How will things change next year after the current seniors graduate?
A: Well, it’s never easy to lose seniors, whether they bring talent in the pool, or their character and personalities outside of competition. Certainly, we’re going to miss that on both sides- the wet and dry side of the team. But that’s part of the deal with high school and high school sports, right? You yourself, are gonna move on and go to college, you know. And so, those kids will move on, they will be missed, they are always welcome back. And the goal is to always bring up new kids. On the bright side, out of our 17 swimmers that are district qualifiers, only 2-4 are seniors. So, we’re in a good spot as a younger crew, we don’t have any senior girls at all so I know we’re small on the girls side, but at least we’ll keep everybody. There’s been different years, [this year] we will be less impacted moving forward with our loss of seniors. Not because of their talent or because of their personalities, just because there are fewer of them. There’s only seven boys graduating and no girls.
Team captain Victoria Khorishko attended the state competition, accomplishing a 5:14.60 in the 500 freestyle, putting her 18th in the state and dropping five seconds off of her season best. She speaks on the season and team’s accomplishments in the video below.
