Hi BTC Summer Swimmers-

Time to get excited for another season of summer swimming at BTC! I am looking forward to welcoming you all to the pool soon!

I am Hilary Stanton-Geddes, your head coach. This will be my 5th season as head coach at BTC and I am just as excited as I was on day one(or almost as excited). There may be a few other things you want to know about me but none seem really important at this point. I grew up in Plattsbugh, NY and swam competitively on the Lake Champlain Waves and for Peru High School until I graduated. I went on to swim all 4 years at Amherst College and graduated too many years ago to count now (it was 2005). I was my college record holder in the 200yd breaststroke (my best event). That record has since been broken and someone else holds that honor now. I have 3 kids on the BTC swim team and this will be our 8th year as BTC Baracudas. Oh and recently I was elected as President of the Vermont State Swimming Association. This highly prestigious and coveted honor, basically means I am responsible for organizing the State Swim Meet on August 1st and 2nd at Upper Valley Aquatic Center. I hope all of you can make it, so this will serve as a save the date now. You don’t want to miss this event, it is a must make event.

Alright on to 3 points of business for you before our season gets underway and you have about 1-200 emails from me a week.

1. Team swim suit and gear order: we will open the K&B store next week. I will send you all an updated link and post it to the website under the team store tab. It closes approximately 2-3 weeks after it is opened. But don’t you worry, I will send a lot of deadline reminders. You will not be able to miss it.
2. Pre-season practices (optional): June 1st- June 11th, Monday-Thursday 4:30-6pm Advanced, 4:30-5:30pm Intermediate, and 5:30-6pm Beginner. No Fridays. No Junior swimmers for pre-season practices, they start at 11am on Monday June 15th, the first day of regular season.
3. Meets: We need lots of help to run both home and away meets. There is no traveling troop of swim meet volunteers that show up and run these meets, it is all on us. So please if your child is participating expect to have at least someone helping out (sibling, caregiver, friend, neighbor, etc). Extra points and a 15% discount on registration if you agree to be a trained swim meet official. Nicole Chance (an official from Middlebury) is running a free online officials training clinic at the start of the summer. Please reach out to her at [email protected] to state your interest in becoming a summer swim official for BTC and interest in taking her online course (1.5-2 hours or less). She has not set a time or date for the course as she was looking to assess interest first. So please give her some interest. 

So this may seem like a lot, especially if you are new to this. But summer swimming is one of those things the more you give, the more you get. For 8 weeks, it is intense with Tuesday and Thursday meets, special events, 2 championship meets, etc. But if you throw yourself all in your kids get a whole lot out of it. They become great swimmers and hopefully learn something about being part of a team along the way.

Alright everyone, it is my pleasure as always. I hope you all have a great rest of your day! Please let me know if you have any questions. Go BTC!

Coach Hilary