Barracudas hunt success down the stretch
♦ Calhoun summer swim team had over 50 boys and girls qualify for GRPA state meet
With over 50 swimmers having qualified for the upcoming GRPA state swim meet, the Calhoun Blue Barracudas are having an outstanding summer season.
“Things are going great,” said Blue Barracudas head coach Todd Ogas. “This is new for me. I’ve never coached a summer swim team before. I’ve coached high school swimming, but never a summer team before. But I’m really enjoying myself. The kids have been great to work with.
“We have a lot of siblings on the team and so you have this situation where a lot of times you have an older sibling working with a younger sibling as well as the younger swimmers around them, so it’s fun to watch. But things are going very well and it’s been exciting to watch the swimmers all continue to drop their times.”
He said the summer swim programs like the Barracudas give kids a chance to find out if the sport is something they enjoy doing.
“I look at summer swimming as kind of the portal to your high school and middle school seasons,” Ogas said. “It really opens the door to a swimmer to find out if it’s something he or she wants to do and if it’s something they want to continue doing. And they can find out without maybe the pressure that comes during the regular swim season. But I see a younger child on the Barracudas having a chance to find out if it’s for them or not by being part of the sport in this type of environment.”
He said racers can learn how to swim fast in the summer while there is a lot more time to teach and educate a potential studentathlete on just how to be the fastest one in the water.
“Yes, we are definitely competitive and the kids are working hard to swim their best times, but the practices and the workouts are much more relaxed,” Ogas said. “We play music when we’re practicing. We play games to work on that competitive spirit. But we try to keep it light and fun and get all the kids involved.”
He said he has two outstanding assistant coaches — Andrew Pierce and Nate Eickman — who not only can relate to the swimmers, but are swimmers themselves as members of the Calhoun boys teams and the Nitros water polo team, which is another club team in the city.
“My two assistants are both Calhoun swimmers and they do a great job with the kids,” Ogas said. “I think both, if they choose to be, have a chance to be coaching swimming for a long time because they work hard, they work well with kids and they’re very knowledgeable. They both know the sport but are still open to learning new things and they’ve just done a great job. And they have been great to work with.”
The Blue Barracudas enter the final weeks of the short season coming off a GRPA District 5 championship on the boys side and a second place on the girls side last Saturday morning at their pool. Individually, the top three finishers in each of the 95 events qualified for the state meet in Moultrie in a couple of weeks.
“We swam very well,” Ogas said of the district meet. “Both teams did a great job and it was a very competitive meet because Catoosa also swam very well. And they had a large team. They actually had more swimmers at the meet than we did and their girls did a good
job to win the girls meet, but we swam well and we needed too because I thought Catoosa and Pickens and Girlmer County was very good competition for us.”
The Blue Barracudas boys team totally dominated their competition, compiling nearly 2,000 points for a 1,972 team score that put them 860 points ahead of secondplace Catoosa.
“There’s a lot of depth on the boys side,” Ogas said. “In that 11-12 age group on up to the older kids, there is a lot of depth. I think the Calhoun Middle School and Calhoun High School are both are going to be fine for the foreseeable future because there are a lot of fast, talented swimmers in that group. And they’re hard workers as well, so I think the future is very bright for a lot of those guys.”
He said he would like to think of the Calhoun Blue Barracudas as a feeder to the high school program, which finished second last year at the 5A state boys meet and is on totally solid ground right now.
“I would hope so,” Ogas said. “I coach high school swimming in the winter so I know how important that workouts in the summer are. That’s when you really have the time to train to become the swimmer you want to be. So I would like to think that our work here translates into helping Calhoun High School.”
After Thursday’s home dual meet with Catoosa (details were not available at press time), the Blue Barracudas have one meet left — a rescheduled meet onTuesday, July 5 against Catoosa again in Fort Oglethorpe. (The meet is rescheduled from June 6 when the two teams were to swim against each other in Calhoun but the meet was
rained out).
They are then in the Chattanooga Area Summer League (CASL) city meet on Friday and Saturday, July 8 and 9 before the end to the summer in the state meet.
“Right now, it’s all about personal achievement for every swimmer,” Ogas said. “Every meet we have left, as a swimmer, you just try to go a little faster than your last swim. You want to knock off time. Even if it’s just two one-hundredths of a second, you want to go just a little faster than you ever have every time you get in the water. So we just want the kids to keep doing what they’re doing and we’ll try to continue to try and clean up some things that can help that, but we’re looking forward to these last couple of weeks and just seeing what the kids can do.”
He said having so many kids at the state meet gives them a chance to be in the running for it all and it will also be a totally different experience for a lot of the state qualifiers, especially the younger ones.
“We’re excited about getting over 50 kids to the state meet,” Ogas said. “And we think it will be great for a lot of the kids because it’s something they’ve never experienced before. We’re going to go to Moultrie and stay in a hotel overnight. There’s a prelims and a finals so you swim one day and then go back to the hotel and swim the next day. You actually have to swim your way into the finals on that second day, so we’re looking forward to seeing how the kids respond to all that.
“But the fact that we had over 50 kids qualify, means we have a chance to have a very good state meet. And I know our kids will compete and so we think it’s going to be a fun couple of days for everyone who will be there. And I think we have a lot of kids who have a chance to do very well.”