Dear Colonies Swim Team,

Hello, my name is Jack McSorley and I am honored to be reaching out to everyone as the head coach for the 2020 swim season. While I realize there exists a significant amount of uncertainty surrounding the next several months as the COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread and disrupt our normal routine, it is still too early to tell how it will affect the GRAL swim season. Until we hear anything, I’m hoping and planning for our season to proceed like normal.

I wanted to reach out today to briefly introduce myself and to explain my coaching philosophy so swimmers will know what to expect when deciding whether to do swim team this year.

Just a little about me:

This season marks my 17^th season of summer swimming. I started swimming at the age of five and haven’t stopped since. I competed for NOVA through high school and currently swim in college. I graduated from Freeman’s Leadership Center in 2017. During my time at Freeman, I witnessed swimming transition from a club sport to a varsity sport in Henrico County. I currently attend Cornell University where I study Operations Research Information Engineering and am a member of the varsity swim team and Naval ROTC. For the past decade, I either swam or coached for Canterbury in the summer, so I have plenty of experience with GRAL (and even competing against Colonies). This past November, the Navy gave me the impression that my training commitments would prevent me from being able to coach this summer, so I resigned from my head coaching position there. In the beginning of March, I found out my Navy training schedule had changed - allowing me to coach this summer with only a few potential conflicts. I realized I had a passion for coaching regardless of the team and am thankful for Hayley Matthews and the rest of the Colonies Swim Team Board for offering me the opportunity to coach for the Colonies this summer. I know this will be my last season of summer swimming before officially becoming a “grown up,” so I want to make it as fun and memorable as possible.

My Coaching Philosophy & What to Expect:

Looking forward to this upcoming summer, my primary objective is to make every swimmer’s Colonies experience as fun as possible. I want to share my passion for this sport by:

• Preventing endless lap swimming in practice
  • At times in the past, I’ve felt summer swim team practices have too closely mimicked a miniature version of a year-round swim team, predominately consisting of seemingly endless laps of swimming. I recognize that Colonies is not a year-round swim team and should not train like one all the time. Swimmers can expect there to still be traditional sets where we will swim laps, but swimmers should not expect to simply swim laps for an entire practice – that’s for year-round teams to do.
• Designing practice to emphasize technique
  • I believe almost every practice should include technique work, where all coaches are in the water working with swimmers on specific skills with the ultimate goal to build every swimmer’s ability, as well as confidence in the sport.
• Incorporating more fun activities and sets into every practice
  • I love incorporating fun activities and sets into almost every practice. I remember all the fun swimming sets I’ve done over the past 16 years and want to share them with my swimmers. These fun sets include stopwatch sets, Skittle practices, drag practices (swimming in t-shirts/costumes) and many more similar ideas where everyone swims and hopefully has fun at the same time.
• Emphasizing the successes of every individual over the success of the team
  • I want to focus on the successes of each swimmer as an individual this summer instead of just the team score. In practice, coaches will encourage self-improvement when working on technique. Before a meet, instead of focusing on beating the other team, the coaching staff will encourage swimmers to pursue best times and new time standards (ADV, JV, V, and SV). My mission is to build every swimmer’s confidence by recognizing more of their achievements. For full disclosure, if we end up winning meets and having more champs qualifiers as a consequence of focusing on individual improvement and achievement, it’ll just be a bonus to everyone’s personal accomplishments.
• Increasing recognition of the non-year-round swimmers’ successes
  • I know sometimes it can feel like year-round swimmers receive most of the recognition during the season. After every meet, GRAL recognizes the triple and quad winners (the swimmers who placed first in three or four events). From my experience, the swimmers on this report are predominately year-round swimmers with some exceptions. While I am a year-round swimmer myself and believe winning 3 or 4 events in a single meet deserves recognition, I also believe there are more important components of swimming than simply placing first. Swimming teaches valuable life lessons about the importance of hard work and dedication in practice. The swimmers who embody these qualities are the ones who will go best times in a meet. As a coach, I want to recognize the swimmers who work hard in practice and go best times in meets because not only are they important life lessons to learn, but they also can be accomplished by anyone regardless of their prior swimming experience. To express simply, I want to recognize achievements that every swimmer can accomplish, regardless of speed.
• Preserving Colonies’ Traditions
  • As an outside hire, I am not yet familiar with CSC’s traditions. I want to learn what makes swimming for Colonies special and make sure they are continued.

I wanted to reach out to everyone and share this vision for the Colonies. Hopefully, this email fosters enthusiasm for the upcoming season with the swimmers and encourages those who might be “on the fence” to consider joining swim team again. I promise to do everything within my ability to have a safe and fun swim team experience!

Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, concerns, or ideas to enhance the Colonies swim team experience for the swimmers. My email is [email protected]. I will happily welcome any feedback to make this season as positive as possible for the swimmers.

Go Cruisers!

Very Respectfully,

Coach Jack