Heat Stroker Swim Meet

We had a 2 day swim meet last weekend in Mesquite, NV.  We are new at this swim meet thing and didn't know what to expect from a 2 day meet.

Friday evening we drove to Mesquite in time for the 6:00 p.m. warm up.  It was crowded!  They had 7 teams at the meet and there were a lot of people there with their lawn chairs, pop up shade structures and coolers.  We had forgotten our chairs and sun screen (ugh!) so Bryan dropped us off, we found my parents and then we tried to put our stuff somewhere while we waited for Bryan to come back with chairs and sunscreen from Walmart.

The kids checked in with their coaches, got their event numbers on their arms and began warming up.  Then we waited, and waited, and waited, and waited.  The organizers of the meet weren't organized at all.  The race numbers ended up being all wrong, the meet started 45 minutes late and there were way too many people!  By about 9:30 our kids had had enough!  I talked to one of the coaches who told me it wasn't any big deal if we wanted to leave and just come back on Saturday.  We debated it because the kids would miss 2 of their 3 events, but in the end they were just miserable and we decided to go home.

 This is how they looked when we got close to home:

We woke up early the next morning and drove to Mesquite in time for the 7 a.m. warm up.  It turns out that the organizers decided to stop the events early on Friday night because it was so late and the kids only ended up missing one event.  They were pretty happy because they didn't want to miss out on anything.  Our head coach asked Bryan to be one of the timers and he was so happy to have something to do!

There was a really helpful app that the organizers used that we were able to keep track on things with.  It wasn't updated as quickly as we would have liked but it was easier to keep up with what was going on.  The kids were signed up for events that weren't in their age brackets so we knew to just ignore those events.  And our coaches were great at helping us understand what was going on with the really disorganized event.  But the second day was a lot of fun and the kids had a blast!!

Here are videos of the kids swimming.

This is Courtney's breast stroke:

This is Ethan's breast stroke:

Courtney was asked to be part of a relay team (a benefit of setting up our chairs next to the coaches).  Here is her butterfly part of the relay.  They ended up taking first!

Ethan was also asked to be part of a relay team but they had enough for the 11-12 year old relay team so they put him on the 13-14 year old relay team.  They also had him swim butterfly which he learned on Wednesday.  He thought it was fun to swim it!

Here is Courtney's free style stroke:

I would have a video of Ethan's awesome freestyle stroke but I accidentally had it on camera instead of video.  He was fast too and isn't happy that I missed it.  But here are photos of the beginning and the ending:

Here are some more random photos from the swim meet: