Novato, Terra Linda face off to open season
Terra Linda, Novato swim teams usher in MCAL return to sports
The starting horn at Novato High’s pool on Friday signaled much more than just the beginning of the meet between the Hornets and visiting Terra Linda.
With the sharp buzzing of the horn, MCAL swimming was also officially back.
While Friday’s match was considered a non-league tilt — the MCAL swim season is scheduled to start March 5 — it was the first time in almost a year that two local schools faced off in an official competition.
Needless to say, the elation was palpable.
“It’s super exciting,” said a masked Kseniya Krayeva, a senior at Novato. “It’s like a little slice of normalcy and it’s just really nice to see everyone I normally would see at school and have an outlet outside of having to stay home.”
Friday’s meet, a 102-64 win for Novato’s boys and a 93-71 win for the girls, was another big step forward in the ongoing gradual return of youth sports in the county. A little over a week ago, the Marin Academy boy’s golf team faced Urban in the county’s first high school sports competition since the pandemic began last March.
San Domenico has also started to compete in cross country and tennis.
Now it’s the MCAL’s turn to follow suit.
“It’s been about four months of planning every little detail and the last month doing dry-runs every single day just about,” said Novato head coach Denise McIntyre. “I wrote the protocol and sent it to the county so the county is looking at today for the guidelines for all the high school swim teams.”
Swimming is categorized as a low-contact outdoor sport by the California Department of Public Health in its youth sports guidelines, meaning it can be held even in counties in the purple tier granted that health and safety protocols are being followed.
Those protocols were on full display on Friday. Locker room use is prohibited so all the swimmers showed up to the pool already dressed to compete. The warm-up periods were staggered to limit the amount of swimmers in the pool at once. Everyone in attendance wore masks. Swimmers even wore them up until the moment they
entered the pool. And even in the pool, swimmers had to maintain extra space between one another.
McIntyre also said that many MCAL teams, including Novato, have smaller rosters this year to further mitigate any risks of spreading COVID-19. Novato, which usually fields a team of around 60 swimmers, has just over 40 this season.
“That was really hard,” McIntyre said. “I’ve never had to cut, so it was really tough. But you have to put safety first.”
Terra Linda started tryouts about three weeks ago but has only officially been practicing with a full team since Monday, said head coach Tim Baker. He said his athletes are still somewhat
adjusting to the new way of life.
“It’s definitely different but just happy to be back to some normalcy,” he said.
The routines for both McIntyre and Baker have been anything but normal for the last year. Both teams had their previous seasons cut short by the pandemic and it wasn’t until late summer when they were able to resume some basic conditioning activities.
Even then a path towards a season looked murky at best. That changed about a month ago when the regional stay-at-home order was lifted for Marin, which finally opened the door to a return to competition.
But both McIntyre and Baker witnessed what
months of uncertainty did to their athletes.
“It’s been heartbreaking to see the impact this has had on the kids,” McIntyre said. “I did preseason (swimming) and preseason water polo and I know firsthand that athletics is saving peoples’ lives right now. The stories these high school kids are telling me, it’s heartbreaking. … A lot of kids are turning to things that aren’t the best as a way to cope with all the disappointments they’ve been given, especially our seniors who had their junior year ripped away and now their senior year is less than ideal but this has been a place where they come and they can smile again.”
Baker said that he noticed some of his athletes have more anxiety than they did before the pandemic. But he added that since they’ve returned to practices with the aim of finally competing, he’s already noticed a positive change.
“The non-social side of things has taken a big toll on them but it seems to me as they’ve come back they’re already loads better,” he said. “There’s already more smiles, everybody is just much happier, which I think once they get back into schools will help even more.”