Finally, a victory for swimming. Centennial High School in Circle Pines, Minnesota has added boys’ swimming for the 2013-2014 school year after receiving approval from the school board for funding, which is expected to amount to about $18,00 primarily for coaching and travel. The team has never previously had boys’ swimming, and was the only team in their conference without a boys’ team.
This comes a year after a boys’ club team was started at the school to accompany the girls varsity team that already exists at the school.
According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the club program already has a stout 28 swimmers in the men’s group last year, which made the decision to add the program that much easier.
Centennial already has a very good women’s program under the watch of head coach Chip Fechter. They placed 12th at last season’s Minnesota High School State Championship meet and were the Northwest Suburban Conference Champions. That includes Tara Chapman, who was 3rd at the meet in the 100 breaststroke in 1:03.73 as just a freshman.
Among other Centennial alums of note are Hawaii senior Ashley Ahn and former Florida Atlantic swimmer Chelsea Richie.
I agree with PAC12BACKER – different sections for different items – it’s not a question of one being more valid as a story, but one of different levels of interest to a greater number of readers.
Granted this is good news for high school swimming in Minnesota, but I’m wondering if SwimSwam should sort these relatively minor articles in a different category than major articles.
Just a suggestion, because right now an article on an Olympic medal swim or world record swim is treated the same way in terms of importance with this type of article and has the same headline banner style/format and scrolls through the timeline equally.
Aren’t some articles more news worthy & important than others and should be treated as such?
Thank you Bradan & SwimSwam for running with this story. I have no connect to swimming in Minnesota in any way, so I have no bias one way or the other. For PAC12BACKER to say that this is ‘not enough’ of a news worthy storyline is foolish and shortsighted. We are watching college swim programs disappear from Universities around the country. To see that a High School is adding a swim program in the day and age when schools are cutting programs is important. This goes to the future of the sport, Thanks