Green Tights Green Tutus Green Rituals

This Saturday, York Girls Varsity Swim team hosted the Western Silver Division Conference, which was filled with swimming rituals, concluding the season for many. The bleachers were packed with teams apart of the WSC, and the balcony was filled with York fans wearing green and white. The swimmers started the meet by wearing drag suits and tights as apart of the pre-conference ritual.

“We definitely have weird rituals. We don’t shave our legs until our last swim meets and we have a styrofoam head that someone puts on and dances too. We do a lot of weird things,” said sophomore Maya Anikeja.

After homecoming, the girls on York’s swim team are not allowed to shave their legs until their  conference meet, which is about a month later. This is so the swimmers get accustomed to swimming with the drag of hair, so when they finally swim after shaving, they can be drag free, making their strides a lot faster

“It’s cool how we don’t shave our legs for a while because when we do, it reduces the amount of drag we have so we go faster,” sophomore Savannah Nichols said. “This is my first time doing this and I was intimidated at first but it really works.”

The swimmers are also recommended to use tech suits at their final event. Tech suits are swimsuits that are designed to make swimmers more energy efficient and fast in the water.

“Tech suits are a really hard time. They take [about] 30-40 minutes to put on, and they hurt,it’s terrible, but [they] do help so much,” Anikeaj said. ”

The swimmers started tapering 2 weeks before their final meets. Taper is a method to prepare swimmers for a major swim meet. The practices start long and hard and gradually get shorter and easier as conference approaches. The goal is to maximize the amount of energy the swimmers have before their swim meet.

“ [Taper] helped me because I knew I had to focus on the technique which I needed to work on a lot this year,” said freshman sectionals swimmer Gabrielle Honken. “Since breaststroke is the slowest stroke, it’s the hardest to go fast in so the technique  we need to do breaststroke needs to be perfect to go faster.”

Although the seasons for most is over, the rituals for future and current girl swimmers will continue on for years.

“The seasons over for me, it was my first season. I thought it was a really great season overall, I can’t wait to do it again. Some of the weirdest rituals we do before the conference was not shaving, wearing tights while warming up, and drag suits. We’re all super close from spending so much time with one another at practices and competitions, so we can say and do anything around another and it’s totally normal, no matter how strange it would seem outside of the team,” said freshman Ciara Belfiore.