The atoms boys swim team season has started off nicely with their first victory against Hayfield on Friday Dec. 1st.

The team has shown great improvement and despite losing some players to graduation, they have seen some younger swimmers step up and show what they are made of.

Sophomore Gabriel Cervoni said, “so far in the season I have performed pretty well, getting back to my times of last year after 5 months off.” 

Cervoni has been a great addition to the swim team and he is still young and has a lot of time left in his high school career to develop. 

The team as a whole however is very strong and has talent all around and in multiple events. When asked about a typical practice for the team Sophomore Ethan Simone said, “as a team, we condition ourselves a lot. We swim with drag, which is baggy clothing and T-shirts because it makes it so much harder to swim.” 

One big focus for the team is pushing themselves. Previously the team sometimes fell behind because they were too relaxed.

 “A new strategy that we are trying out this year is to push yourself for every event as much as we can at every meet.” Said Cervoni. He adds, “This is a strategy that will help our team because in previous meets that we thought were going to be easy, we relaxed and didn’t push ourselves for some events, slowly giving them points that we could have easily gotten, ending the meet with a loss. We learned this strategy from TJ who takes most of the state spots in the region.”

Freshman Connor Uzokoff said, “I would say the team is solid, one thing we could work on though is actually showing up to the meets. I understand that sometimes people have things and events to attend, but having a meet with every member of the team would be pretty cool.”

 A struggle the team has faced is getting back into the routine. “The hardest part of the season was getting back into swimming after not doing it since summer.” Said Simone.

With practices being around 2 hours long the swimmers are getting well conditioned and in great preparation for their future meets.

With the team having some very strong swimmers, they look forward to having some go to districts and beyond. 

Cervoni said, “I think that I can personally make it to districts, but probably not make finals. As a team I think most of us can make districts few kids into regional, and hopefully at least one kid into states.”

Overall the team is looking strong and has a lot they can still work on. They are very optimistic and plan to have numerous swimmers go to districts and have all the swimmers set some new record times for themselves because this sport is also very personal despite being on a team.