Hey FAST Families,

First, thank you to everyone who helped set up, run, and clean up at yesterday’s meet! Hosting meets at FUMA is still relatively new for us and we’re continuing to iron out the little details but I was extremely happy with how smoothly everything ran yesterday. It truly wouldn’t have been possible without all of your help, so thank you for making it such a successful meet!

FAST finished 2nd, behind Greene Hills and ahead of Gordonsville. More importantly, our swimmers continue to improve each week. We had 112 season-best times out of 171 swims (about a 2/3 best-time ratio), and many of those were major time drops. Huge shoutout to Marcus Mitchell for dropping nearly 15 seconds in his 25 free, Brooklyn Stauffer for dropping nearly 25 seconds in her 50 breast, and Grady Shaw for dropping over 28 seconds off of his 100 free. Those are just a few of our many many time improvements and first time swims yesterday. It’s exciting to see the work our swimmers are putting in at practice continue to pay off as we head towards JSL champs. I’m looking forward to seeing what our athletes are able to accomplish during the final stretch of the season. I have included a time improvement report below so that you all can look through all of the best times we had yesterday.

We were also down to five individual disqualifications but we did also have two relay disqualifications. Every DQ came in an event the swimmer has completed legally before. We are going to work on building up good habits in practice so that we can avoid having these small mistakes pop back up next week or at champs.

FAST swimmers are now up to 31 Gold Times earned by 11 different athletes so far this season! I’ll attach an updated list of Gold Times in both Short Course Meters (SCM) and Short Course Yards (SCY). Since we’ve only had one meet in a yards pool this season, most of our Gold Times have been earned in SCM.

The JSL has also released its updated Top 50 Rankings HERE. The JSL includes nearly 3,000 swimmers from teams around the Charlottesville area so earning a spot in the Top 50 for an age group, event, and gender is a tremendous accomplishment. Our current best times report will also be attached below for you all to view.

Google Photos Album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/oeZK8hvKb4uh8nty9. Please take a look at all the photos we took last night and feel free to add in any that you all took as well.

A few updates for the rest of the week:

• The Swim-a-Thon online kickoff has been pushed back to early next week. Be on the lookout this weekend for updated information. That means practices will be held as scheduled this afternoon and all day tomorrow without any meetings involved.
  • Please come in this afternoon to practice if you are able as we are unsure what the weather will do tomorrow and we already had to miss a practice earlier this week.
• Meet ribbons will be available at the pool beginning today. Time improvement ribbons from last night’s meet will be available early next week.
• We have one final home meet next Wednesday at FUMA so please log into SwimTopia to declare your swimmers. It’s also a great time to start declaring for the Championship Meet. I hope to see everyone at both of these meets!
• We are nearly a week out from our scheduled drive in movie night at the Fork Union Drive in that just opened up. Be on the lookout for info on that fun team get together soon.

Great job to all of our FAST swimmers yesterday, and thank you again to everyone who helped make the meet a success. I’ll see you all on deck!

Coach Mike DiFazio