Olds has a new speed swimming team.
Clint Stevens, former coach of the Olds Rapids year-round swim club, has started up a summer competitive swim club, which he has named Rogue Racing Club (RRC). Its members will train and compete until the third week of August.
The other club, the Olds Rapids, is a year-round club.
Stevens, who describes himself as the president, founder and head coach of the not-for-profit Rogue Racing Club, says the team consists of 11 youth between seven and 17 years old. When interviewed, he said a 12th person was expected to join shortly.
"And maybe when lacrosse is over I might get a few more," he added.
Members of the RRC have been training for a while, but their competitive season officially began with a meet in Lacombe this past weekend.
Stevens says he'd like to host a meet in Olds but because of various factors, including the fact this club just began this spring, there just isn't the opportunity this year. He's hoping his club will host a meet next year or in the next couple of years.
Stevens, who is entering his 40th year in one aspect or another of competitive swimming, says there are a lot of advantages to summer swim clubs.
"Not every kid wants to swim during the winters; they play other sports, right? So this is the bridge between winter sport or going back to hockey type thing," he says, adding speed swimming is also good cross-training for other sports.
For that reason, he says, he has members who are in hockey, lacrosse, soccer, gymnastics.
Stevens set up the RRC April 4.
"A lot of parents in the community approached me," he says. "I've been consulting around the province with summer clubs for the last six years."
Stevens says club members swim all four competitive strokes: freestyle, backstroke, butteryfly (known simply as fly) and breaststroke. They also compete in individual medley (IM) which is a combination of strokes.
They participate in short and long races (known as events) ranging in length from 50 metres to 400 metres -- even beyond in some cases.
Members of the club train in the Olds Aquatic Centre Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 5:30 to 7 p.m. They will undertake dryland training on Wednesdays until the Rapids club takes a break. At that point, members of the RRC will train Tuesday through Thursday.
Stevens is hoping to raise money from the community to help fund the club.
"Usually this process takes about three to six months to kind of get all your ducks in a row," Stevens says.
"I was approached at the end of March, early April; submitted all the stuff into ASSA (Alberta Summer Swimming Association) to get approval and I was approved April 27, so we're playing catch-up. Usually you have these plans in place back in January."
That creates a problem when it comes to fundraising, Stevens says, "because right now, a lot of organizations and businesses that support the community have already allocated their funds; so that's the hard part."
Stevens was asked why the club uses the word rogue in its name
"Just to break away from the status quo, so to speak," he says. "I'm not a traditional-type coach. I do things a little bit more uniquely, I guess, than swimming up and down the pool. That's kind of boring, in my books.
"We just do things differently, and rogue kind of fits that mould."
