Bullpen: Creation of Gig Harbor-based competitive swim club in the works

The Narrows Aquatics Association, founded by Mike Kelly, the Gig Harbor High boys and girls swim coach who also coaches girls water polo, is offering a new aquatic conditioning program this summer.

It’s open to kids of all ages, and currently has participants from elementary school, middle school and high school. It’s also open to recent college graduates who wish to stay in shape for competitive swimming, in any capacity.

“It’s a good mix of kids trying to improve their swimming, as well as other water polo athletes,” Kelly said. “It’s been opened up to anyone that can last two hours of swimming, including masters athletes — anyone 18 and over that still wants to do competitive swimming.”

Kelly is hoping to build the foundation for a club swim team in the Gig Harbor area, which most likely would be called Narrows Swim Club. Currently, year-round swimmers in the Gig Harbor area swim for Tacoma Swim Club, or other select clubs.

“If we get the pool time, we’re hoping to get (the club started) in September,” Kelly said. “We’ve gotten a good response to the aquatic conditioning — we feel that if given the opportunity to use the pool, we’d have plenty of people support us. It’s just the issue of pool usage and pool access.”

Currently, the Peninsula School District closes the Peninsula High swimming pool during the entire summer, which makes the community’s pool usage restricted to the Gig Harbor High School pool. One of the tenants is Tacoma Swim Club, which uses Gig Harbor’s pool as part of its rotation.

“That kind of prevents us from going full force with a local swim program,” Kelly said. “Hopefully moving forward, we can convince the school district it might be better to serve a local community program rather than another one. (Tacoma Swim Club) has used Wilson, Foss and Lincoln. There’s plenty of spots for them.”

Many Gig Harbor-based swimmers have swam and continue to swim for Tacoma Swim Club, which makes its presence in the Gig Harbor community understandable. But with all the bridge tolls and travel costs Gig Harbor swim families accumulate being part of the Tacoma Swim Club, Kelly said he thinks there’s a better way.

“We’re definitely moving forward,” Kelly said. “The people are really positive about a program based in the Gig Harbor area. A lot of kids with TSC are forced to go across the bridge to their workouts, pay a toll every day. Parents have to really commit. … An option in Gig Harbor would eliminate time and cost consumption of travel.”

The aquatic conditioning program is currently in its first session, which ends July 21. The second session will go through August.

“This provides athletes from Peninsula, Gig Harbor, Wilson — wherever — a chance to start getting into shape instead of waiting until August 22,” Kelly said. “That way, kids are already coming in with a good amount of conditioning and don’t have to struggle early in the season.”

As far as Masters swimmers getting a chance to continue competing, it’s an idea that Kelly has floated around before. At one point, there was a loosely organized outfit called GHOST: Gig Harbor Old Swimmers Team.

“It was just people getting themselves in shape and showing up at regional meets,” Kelly said.

Although the GHOST program is effectively defunct at the moment, Kelly hopes the conditioning program offers a way for young adults to continue, or get back into competitive swimming.

Aside from that, it’s primarily a way for high school athletes to stay in shape for their swim seasons, so they don’t have to play catch-up during the first few weeks of the season. And it gives water polo players a chance to improve their conditioning and stamina.

“The conditioning program is essentially a swim practice,” Kelly said. “For polo players, we do some polo-specific things like head-up swimming. But there’s no ball handling or anything.”

This story was originally published July 6, 2016 at 11:30 AM with the headline "Bullpen: Creation of Gig Harbor-based competitive swim club in the works."