Young swimmers and water polo players from area swim clubs are happy to be back in the pools, but the logistic headaches continue for their coaches.
“This is the hardest year I could remember and I have been coaching for 17 years,” said Scott Erdman, head coach of the Hinsdale Swim Club.
It was not just the lack or shortage of pools in May and early June, due to the coronavirus shutdown. It has been adapting to the rule changes as Illinois moves from one phase to the next of its reopening plan.
“It has changed almost every week,” said Joey Waldorf, head coach of Lyons Aquatics, which typically has 350 to 500 members age 7 to adult, during the school year on its swim team, water polo and diving teams. For the late spring and summer, the number usually drops to between 200 and 250 boys and girls, who would be in the water training in April.
The majority of swimmers live in La Grange, La Grange Park and Western Springs and the club teams swim exclusively in Lyons Township High School’s North and South campus pools, Waldorf said. But those pools have not reopened yet.
So in early June, when Illinois allowed public pools to reopen for swim teams, lessons and lap swimmers, the Lyons team headed to the McCook Aquatics and Exposition center, known as MAX, and rented the indoor pool from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. for kids who were freshmen, sophomores or juniors the past school year. Only those ages could practice because of capacity limits to comply with the state’s COVID-19 restrictions.
“During that phase, we had one kid per lane,” Waldorf said. “Normally, we have six to eight kids per lane, depending on the age group and the time of year.”
“As of Monday, June 22, we began training at Hinsdale Community Pool and were able to add several small groups of 11 and 12-year-olds and 13 and 14-year-olds,” and a few opportunities for water polo players to practice, too.”
Lyons Aquatics also plans to rent pool time at the Village Field Club in La Grange Park, but as of June 30 the private club was still waiting for its license from the Illinois Department of Public Health to reopen.
When Village Field opens, “we will have all our groups back in the water,” Waldorf said, from age 10 through 18 and the water polo teams.
But when pools were in short supply, some of the pools that were open charged a premium, the coaches said.
“Our rates are substantially higher,” Waldorf. “In some cases, twice as much,” as when they rented the Lyons Township High School pools.
The Hinsdale Swim Club, too, has added swimmers per lane as the state has increased the size of the groups that are allowed from 10 to 50.
The Hinsdale club, which draws members from a dozen nearby towns, including Clarendon Hills, Oak Brook, Willowbrook and Elmhurst, was first able to get in a pool June 8 at the Five Seasons Family Sports Club in Burr Ridge. The club used the outdoor pool 16 hours a day from 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., because only one person swam in each lane at a time.
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The schedule means coaches were spending 10 hours a day on the deck, wearing masks when the temperature sometimes was near 100 degrees, Erdman said.
The club also rented time in Oak Brook’s indoor pool, where groups of eight swam at one time, one child per lane.
In later weeks, two swimmers, starting at opposite ends of the pool, shared the same lane.
Coaches are following the guidelines of USA Swimming, the national governing body for competitive swimming, and the Illinois High School Association, which Waldorf and Erdman said suggest there is a greater possibility of the virus passing between swimmers when they cluster around the pool than when they are swimming, because the chlorine in the water acts as a disinfectant.
So locker and changing rooms are closed. Swimmers arrive in their suits. The Hinsdale club has placed hula hoops on the ground spaced apart where the children are told to stand while they take off shirts or shorts and where they leave their backpacks when they get in the pool.
Volunteers took the temperature of every person before they got in the pool, Erdman said.
At Five Seasons, because the Hinsdale club was the only group using the pool in early June, the club paid to install plexiglass dividers between the lanes at both ends of the pool to prevent the spread of germs when swimmers finish their laps out of breath and stand in the water.
Swimmers were assigned lanes and swam next to the same swimmers at every practice, Erdman said.
Coaches also had one group clear the pool area before allowing the next group to enter. All these steps were precautions so that if someone did contract the virus, the people who had been in contact with that person at the pool would be limited and identifiable.
“It’s a very controlled system,” Erdman said.
Still, it’s difficult to maintain social distancing, he said.
“The younger kids don’t get it and the high school kids think they can do whatever they want,” Erdman said.