By Robert McKinney, Assistant Athletics Director, Communications
SALEM, Ore. -- With a little bit of creativity the Willamette University swimming teams recently held an unconventional Intrasquad Week of competition. Limited by COVID-19 protocols that prevented a typical Intrasquad Meet, the Bearcats found new ways to make practice fun.
Two teams were formed. The Gold Team was led by captains Surya Lee (Jr., Bainbridge Island, WA/Bainbridge HS) and Daniel Fang (Sr., Rancho Santa Margarita, CA/Catholic HS), and the Cardinal Team was led by captains Claire Johnson (Sr., Deerfield, IL/Deerfield HS) and Ben Fritz (Sr., Los Gatos, CA/Leigh HS). The team captains drafted their teams.
During the week-long competition, six swimming events and five non-swimming events were held, with points awarded from each event. The swimming events included 50-yard distances in all four strokes (butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle), plus the 100-yard individual medley and the 25-yard backwards dolphin kick, which the team refers to as the backwards worm.
Events held outside of the pool were cone bocce ball, a bottle flip challenge, blind drawing (which was won by a vote on Instagram), tennis ball toss into a bucket, and a carnival-style bottle knock down game (throwing tennis balls and trying to knock down water bottles).
"It was really fun and a great way to relieve some stress!," said Fang. "Not only was it nice to get up and race again, but we got to do some more game-like events that gave us the opportunity to inject some competitive energy into it."
The Bearcats held two swimming events per day and added one or two non-swimming events at each practice. Every swimmer was able to score in the swimming events. In non-swimming events the scoring varied, sometimes one individual scored, other times all competitors scored.
"It was fun even though I was questionably disqualified in the 50 fly," Fritz said jokingly.
"It was great to be able to continue on the fun tradition of an Intrasquad competition and adapt it to be COVID safe," Johnson said. "We even added a new aspect to our competition with minute-to-win-it challenges. It has been some of my favorite memories during this difficult time because we were all able to just have fun with each other.
"It reminded me of how much I love swimming and how amazing all my teammates and coaches are, and why I chose to come to Willamette in the first place," Johnson continued. "So even though this certainly isn't how I pictured my senior season of swim going, we are making the best of it."
According to Willamette Head Swimming Coach Brent Summers the overall competition was close and went back-and-forth each day.
The Cardinal Team held a 30-point lead after the first day, and the Gold Team was in front by 41 points after the second day. The overall title came down the final event, which was the carnival-style bottle knock down game.
When the knock down game was over, the Cardinal Team had won the event and claimed the overall championship by five points.
"This year's Intrasquad was certainly unique in that I expanded it to be a week-long competition instead of only a day," Summer said. "I also decided I wanted to add some fun out-of-water challenges so that everyone had an opportunity to help their team score points. Both teams did a great job of racing fast and with the out-of-the-water challenges. Looking forward to next year, I'd like to keep many of the out-of-water events during the week that leads to our more traditional Intrasquad Meet. Overall, I think this year was a nice break from the more traditional training we have done. It allowed the swimmers to have fun and enjoy being at practice with each other.
"I think Intrasquad comes at a really key point in the season," Lee commented. "In a normal season, it's really the beginning of any kind of competition when we have been practicing hard for a month without much to break that up. It allows us to get into that competitive mindset with low stakes. This season, it was really important for keeping morale. Brent did an awesome job of designing some ridiculous competitions that keep things light in a really trying week."
