8-3-07 As of today, Friday, we're just over halfway into the summer Junior Olympics (or "JO's"). Competition started Wed. night for some, and goes through Sat., with the team relays on Sunday.
I took most of these photos on Thursday and a few on Friday. I shot mostly video on Friday for a short video project I thought about. (Afterall, you can only shoot so many swimming shots of the same kids day after day! LOL!) The wireless Wi-Fi in our hotel room has been spotty (hence the delay in updating this blog), but for some reason, I'm getting full signal strength right now so am hammering this out as fast as I can before I lose my signal!
Here's a look at the JO's so far....enjoy! And congrats to all those kids who worked hard to get to JO's!
The obligatory group warm-up session, led here by Coach Matt.
Why do these swimmers look a bit more anxious than usual? Is it because they'll be racing against some of the fastest kids from the other teams? Naaaah!!! RST swimmers can hold their own, even against the BIG clubs like Mission Viejo and TCC.
Unlike the usual meets where you might be signed up for 2, 3, or even 4 events for part of the day, you may be swimming in just 1 or 2 events at JO meet, depending on what you qualifed for. With a LOT of swimmers, you may be waiting for HOURS before your one and only event. So there's a lot of downtime to kill. Justin has lots of experience at these long meets. Here, he teaches the kids how to play "Catch Phrase", where we heard some interesting descriptions like, "Walking up a ladder" or "It begins with 'c' and ends in 'e' but I'm not spelling it."
Others choose to kill time in a different way. Here's Shea and his dad, Neal, doing some kind of yoga move. Is that Shea's secret weapon???
Even the coaches let their hair down during these long stretches. Here Coach Matt is about to give a snoozing swimmer a surprise awakening with water!
Hehehe, if you can dish it out, you have to be able to take it! Here Heidi is about to give Coach Matt a taste of his own medicine while he catches some Zzzz's....
(BTW, neither of these snoozers actually got doused with water while they were sleeping. ;-)
By the 3rd day, these poor coaches have worked so hard that they'll catch a few Zzz's wherever they can. I was unable to get picture of coach Vicky snoozing, however. Wonder what these guys have been doing at night so close to Knotts and CA Adventure? Were these guys riding on the tea cup ride one too many times???
"Let me do a mind meld with you and give you some of my swimming wisdom."
Getting ready for their races...
A good-luck kiss from mom Kim to Melissa, which obviously paid off, as you'll see later on.
Mia says to Summer, "Boy, I'm so tired from my warm-up, I can barely get out of the pool!" Obviously, Summer is tired, too!
Check out these flying swimmers...
No, these are NOT warm-up starts, these our "time trials" where you can pay extra to race an event and work on getting a time. That's why you see Summer racing against these bigger girls and even boys--they could be all doing different strokes at the same time!
And the race is on! Look at these RST swimmers go!!!
Check out how enthusiasticly parents, siblings, and friends were cheering for each other. Now that's RST team spirit! (Even though we're told you swimmers can't hear us, we love screaming our heads off anyway!)
Swimmers would check the big scoreboard right after their race to see their time.
After swimming in the prelims of their event(s), quite a few RST swimmers made it into the Final 16 later that evening, and a few even made it in the top 8 and on the podium, like Melissa did here in the 100m backstroke.
(Podium photo taken by Summer.)
Congrats to all those swimmers for making it to JO's! We still have one more day to go, and then team relays on Sunday, so watch for an update on that next!
