Along with the rest of BVNW’s winter sports, this year’s boys swim and dive team is splashing into action. With the season just beginning, swimmers are getting ready with the help of head coach Kyle Farrington.

“What we focus on this year is that we need everyone to buy in, everybody to work hard and everybody to improve,” Farrington said. “It’s really going to be one of those teams this year where it’s going to be a team effort for us to accomplish our goals; it’s really going to take everybody to do that.”

Last year, the team placed third at EKL and tenth at state. The team hopes to have more swimmers qualify for state this year, Farrington said.

“We had a bunch of guys outside looking in last year who weren’t quite able to qualify for state,” Farrington said. “We have a huge group of sophomores that I’m looking forward to having step up and qualify.”

Sophomore Joey Lambertz started as a freshman and is going on his second year on the team. He swam at the EKL meet last year, a contributing part to the team taking third in all.

“I did pretty good at EKL last year,” Lambertz said. “But it’s not something I want to repeat this year. I want to do better.”

However, according to Lambertz, it’s not just him wanting to do better this year. The whole team is striving, as always, to do better at EKL.

Many of the swimmers have been on the team since their freshman year at BVNW. The new seniors, according to Farrington, are bringing new policies to the team and have helped the team grow as a whole.

“I feel I’ve grown really close, especially to the senior group because they have started basically from ground zero where they came in brand new to the sport, and have invested themselves in it,” Farrington said. “It’s always been a close-knit team, but I think, especially with this year’s senior group, it will make it an even stronger bond.

Senior Marcus Winslow said he loves being the top dog on the team because he gets to give guidance to the younger swimmers. He tells them that if they work hard and swim out of season, it could really help to improve their skill.

“It’s cool being able to go up through being one of the slowest people on the team to being able to hold your own,” Winslow said. “It helps to improve if everyone just works hard like we did at the beginning of the year and keep working hard throughout the year.”

Lambertz agrees that it is a team goal to get better, and the swimmers have to work hard to grow as a team and win.

“This group, we aren’t the year-round swimmers that you’re used to. We’re just hard workers, I guess you could say,” Lambertz said. “We don’t have talent going in, it’s just hard work.”