Courtesy: Justin Correia
The SouthWest Stars Swim Team in Winter Garden, Florida held the 5th annual edition of the Peppermint Relays on Saturday, with almost 50 swimmers showing up to take part in the festivities.
The tradition began in 2014, when Justin Correia was hired as the team’s head coach. As he explains, he had pushed his swimmers pretty hard in the leadup to the first practice.
“I thought it would be cool to have a fun recovery practice to break up the monotony,” Correia told SwimSwam. “So I came up with a relay day. In the spirit of the holidays, I go and get a box of peppermints and every team that wins a relay gets peppermints as their prize.”
Correia says that after 5 years, the tradition, which is held on the Saturday before every Christmas, has become one of the swimmers’ favorite days.
“The first year we did it, I had about 12 swimmers,” Correia said. “Since then our team has grown to where this year we had 49! We traditionally include all of our senior group and the senior prep group, but this year we decided to have our (top 11/12 year olds), so the older kids got to swim relays with the younger group.”
This year, Correia says that they added a new relay, which he borrowed from coach Keri Clynes at the Rec-Plex Sharks. The relay is called the ‘Christmas Solo Cup tree relay,’ which requires swimmers to swim down the pool with a cup on their head and stack it in a Solo Cup Christmas Tree before swimming back and releasing their teammate.
As with all practices, the team ended the day with a cheer: