Eastside High School’s swim team has been producing successful seasons one after another since head coach DeAnna O’Brien took over in 2018.
The success of the program comes for a multitude of reasons, but unity has to be at the top of the list. With both boys and girls teams, it’s easy for high schoolers to separate, but not at Eastside, they look at themselves as one team.
“Swimming is often viewed as an individual sport with swimmers racing against the clock, trying to get a PR, break a record, or qualify for state,” O’Brien said. “What I think is unique about EHS is that our team understands that we are just that, ‘a team’.”
This year specifically was tough for the Eagles, O’Brien noted that it was the “most difficult” scheduling season in her seven seasons as a coach. They faced multiple injuries to top swimmers and had several meets canceled because of weather, pool malfunctions and more. However, through all of that adversity came growth in the Eastside team.
“This year’s squad really took to heart the idea of sacrifice and swimming for the team,” O’Brien said. “We had a record number of swimmers go outside their comfort zone and train in multiple strokes, and also compete in multiple strokes.”
The culture O’Brien has built at Eastside is a key part of the success of the program. She mentioned that she approaches every season with virtually the same mindset, progress over performance.
“I hear myself yelling constantly, ‘You will race like you practice!’,” O’Brien said. “We can teach all the technique, we can run all the drills, we can talk up the visualization skills, that is our job as coaches; but each swimmer must adopt the mindset of progress over performance and that happens at practice. If you are not treating every set like a race, not necessarily in terms of speed, but in terms of technique and focus, then why are we even in the pool?”
On top of all of their success in the pool, the Eagles are just as impressive outside of it. Eastside is a Special Olympic Unified Swim Team, which allows athletes with disabilities to compete with those without disabilities.
Over the years, Eastside has had 14 athletes compete on Unified Relay teams at the Georgia Special Olympic Summer Games at Emory University. They’ve brought home the gold every year, and they’ll be participating again on May 17, back at Emory.
The Eagles have been successful over the past few years, but they’ve had to travel outside of the county for practice. This year, they were able to return back to the pool at Oxford College. O’Brien believes this could lead to another step forward for the Eastside program.
“With the move home to Oxford pool, I hope to see our numbers recover to the pre-pandemic roster size which was about double what we have now,” O’Brien said. “I hope to see middle school feeder programs in our future and adding swim teams to all of our high school athletic programs. All of our students deserve the opportunity to swim!”
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