With the closure of two YWCA fitness centers last year, the Otters, a competitive youth swimming program in Minneapolis, no longer had a pool to call home.
But when those opportunities dried up, parents of children on disbanded swim teams banded together to create the Minneapolis Lake Monsters. The Minneapolis Lake Monsters are perhaps the only modern swim team in the city open to children ages 7 to 12.
“It's really fun,” said Charlie Elliott, 11, who swims mainly backstroke and freestyle. “It's nice to know some people from Otter. That's nice.”
Most of the children's swim teams are located in the suburbs. Brian Elliott, a member of the Minneapolis Lake Monsters swim team and Charlie's father, said there are only a few high school swim teams in Minneapolis and few options for competitive swimming before high school. . Ultimately, Lake Monsters plans to target players up to his age of 14.
When the YWCA closed its two pools, Elliott wasn't the only parent looking for a local swim team on short notice. The parents of about 200 other Otters children had to find new teams or quit swimming.
After the Otters disbanded, about 10 percent of the kids joined the Lake Monsters, and 35 percent joined a swim team outside Minneapolis, said David Cameron, a former Otters coach and Lake Monsters volunteer. 45% said they had quit competitive swimming.
“I looked at each swimmer's current situation individually and looked at the top option for people on different teams, just short of the majority, to quit swimming completely. '' Coach Cameron said. “Despite our hard work, we have lost a lot of people in this sport.”
Elliott and Cameron teamed up to form a new swim team just seven weeks after their old team disbanded. Elliott founded the team as a non-profit and assembled a management and coaching staff.
Coach Cameron worked with Sylvia Zabaleta-Ime, director of Minneapolis Area Education Swimming, to find a place and time for the new team to practice three days a week. For now, the Minneapolis Lake Monsters practice at Southwest High School, but Elliott hopes to expand to another school's swimming facility in the fall.
Elliott said offering competitive swimming in Minneapolis is essential to growing the sport and teaching children how to swim in the land of 10,000 lakes.
“Swimming was always the only thing my kids learned,” Elliott said. “We live in Minneapolis, a city of lakes, and we wanted to know that our kids could go to the lake or swim in the pool and not have to worry about it.”
swim towards more opportunities
Mr Elliott said access to public pools was essential to give children the opportunity to swim after their first swimming lesson. On the North Side, a new five-lane, 25-yard pool is scheduled to open this spring at the V3 Sports Center, but access remains uneven.
“Between the ages of 7 and 10, when swimming lessons end, there's really nothing to keep them going unless they have a club to join until they get to high school,” Elliott said. I pointed out that there was no. I don't have a team.
Prime Minister Cameron said the community and friendships that children can gain through competitive swimming are why the sport is needed in cities.
“When kids talk about what they love about swimming, they almost always talk about their free time between sets or on deck or the workouts they do with other people,” Cameron said. “While in a race you're swimming individually in a race against time in a very objective way, the way everyone interacts around the pool makes it feel like a community and a team sport.”
Prime Minister Cameron added that encouraging swimming in urban areas would help reduce racial disparities in drownings. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black and indigenous children are nearly three times more likely to die from accidental drowning than white children.
More talented swimmers will also be key to filling the post-pandemic lifeguard shortage, Zabaleta Ifume said.
Vincent Frankl, a parent whose daughter played for the Otters and later joined the Lake Monsters, said when she was looking for a swim team, she struggled because there were no options available in Minneapolis.
“It's very interesting to see that there wasn't a swim club in the city like in Minneapolis,” Frankl said. “It was a bit of a challenge. I didn't know what to do, but I'm glad the Lake Monsters came.”
