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ABJ Scots swimmers win small school banner

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It certainly didn’t hurt having a swimming pool attached to their school.

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But even being buoyed by having the Emerald Hills Leisure Centre and its pool linked up to Archbishop Jordan Catholic High School couldn’t be credited for the incredible success of the Scots swimming team this season.

In only its third year of even having a team, the ABJ Scots shocked the swim scene at the recent Metro Athletics Swimming Championships at the Kinsmen Aquatic Centre in Edmonton.

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With a 30-member squad, the Scots were not only able to capture the small school team division banner, they actually finished in second place amongst all 28 competing schools, coming in only behind the dominant Scona team of 122 swimmers.

Not only that, ABJ’s Grade 12 girls placed first over the Scona squad in that category and the overall Grade 11 group came in second against all comers.

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It is a major accomplishment for a team which has only been around for three years, finishing fourth the last two years in the larger school category before moving down this year and grabbing top spot in the small school division. In those three years they have not only been the top Catholic school in the pool, but also the best from any of Edmonton’s satellite communities in total.

The team started in 2016 when the pool next door to the new ABJ school was completed and it was pretty obvious it was time to cobble together a swim squad.

The ABJ swim team started with the push from my Grade 10 daughter and a few of her friends,” said Scots swim head coach Charlene Douglas. “With the building of the Emerald Hills pool attached to the high school, it was a perfect fit to start a swim team and it got off the ground thanks to then principal Mr. Brett Cox, who said it was a go if we had a coach. So my daughter volunteered me, and I’m so glad that she did. I am so proud of this group of kids that come to the pool two or three days per week before school starts and want to be on a school team.”

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Much of the Scots success story came as a result of its relay teams.

The Grade 10 freestyle girls won silver, as did the Grade 11 boys. The Grade 11 girls added bronze medals.

Winning individual medals in the various events were Shaeley Douglas, Lindsey Vallaire, Lexi Marissink, Brooklyn Holt, Grace Egilsson, Trey Saretsky, Mathew Smith, Jake Rozak and Aaron Batoche.

Saretsky set a championship record when he took gold in the 50m butterfly.

“They all worked so hard and deserved this,” Douglas said.

Coach Douglas said that one of the most rewarding part of the school’s success is that so few members of the team had previous proficiency in the pool.

“We’re not like Scona where we have tons of stars and have swimmers in every single race,” she said. “We are just a sold group of kids who train hard. Out of the 30 of them, only five of them are year-round competitive swimmers. There is another handful that do summer swimming. I have three synchronized swimmers and one national-level water polo player. So more than half the team just had an interest in swimming and wanted to be part of a school team. They just wanted to learn more and become better swimmers. It is awesome because it isn’t just a team of active competitive swimmers, the majority of them don’t have a competitive background. One thing is that we can’t dive into our pool, so we actually had to train the kids on how to dive for the starts at mini-meets before we got to the championship. A lot of our warm-ups were just practicing diving of the block, because many of them had never done it before.”

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Having a pool attached to the school may not have been the sole factor in the Scots’ success story, but it was a big one.

“It has been so handy,” Douglas said. “I think that’s why this team was such a hit, right off the bat. We train in the morning so parents could drop the kids off on the way to work and not worry about having to pick them up later. They train for an hour, and then are able to walk right into the school without even going back outside. The people at Emerald Hills have been awesome. It is us and a bunch of seniors in the morning and they love having the kids there. They have actually said that they get kind of sad when our season is over and that they miss the high school kids being there with them. It has been neat having that connection with the seniors and others in the community.”

Another swimmer that trained with ABJ, Aden Gagnon, competed for SCA at the Metros, winning bronze in the 100m backstroke.

sjones@postmedia.com
twitter.com/Realshanejones

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