Hi Team,

What a great night we had! The meet started with a truly wonderful rendition of the National Anthem by our own Jack Henry. I was super impressed with his ability to overcome his nerves (he confided before he sang he was excited and nervous) and deliver an impressive performance! Then we had some tears as we honored both our Senior Wesley Green and our Super Senior Hugh “the apprentice” Gannon! We have been honored to have both young men as part of the Dolphin Dive team and I hope they stay connected in the years to come! It would have been a GREAT night if we ended then but there were more fireworks to come.

While we were missing a few key players. We pulled it together for a 47-25 victory. It was highlighted by complete sweeps (1st, 2nd, 3rd) by are Freshman girls, Intermediate girls and intermediate boys! Congratulations to our 1st places Kayla, Evie K., Paxton, Leah and Matthew!

Going into last night we had a mathematical chance to win the Division 6 championship! However, we needed to win have Cardinal Hill lose and then obtain more points than they did. Well, you know we won and I can tell you Cardinal Hill was defeated by Parliament. Unfortunately, we didn’t obtain enough points to win the tie breaker. We ended up coming in 2nd by just 14 points. While disappointing, I hope no one is disappointed. We had a great regular season.
Coach Samson and his coaching staff (Wesely, Matt, Virginia, Michael and Mason) did an amazing job teaching, consoling (there is crying in diving), and cheering our team. They worked around a number of vacations, illnesses and plain old nerves! And let’s not forget, just as importantly, they taught a historic number of kids how to dive this summer and/or significantly improve or grow their diving skills. I couldn’t be more proud of them and I hope you are too!

I am just as proud of each of our team members. Everyone contributed in their way. Diving is an individual sport. You can’t pass it to someone else, you can’t just do one part of the dive and let a teammate finish it up. However, there are teammates in dive. The friendships that develop in practice creates desire and responsibility to show up for the next practice. The friendships that grow strong provide strength to allow others to overcome fear and either overcome a hurdle or perform at their best. I was complimented at 4 out of 5 meets about how close our girls teams are. How much fun are older divers were having. If you noticed many of the teams we faced were very heavy at freshman and light after juniors. Our increased numbers in the teenage levels is unique and should be appreciated. These girls and guys, who are keeping it fun for each other, and allowing the team to have an ecosystem that is unlike others in our league.

Where do we go from here. Fun practice is this morning, everyone is invited! You all worked hard and deserve one more fun practice. This Sunday we will compete in Divisionals. We can only send 17 divers and they will compete against the best in our division for the right to go to All-Stars! As such, after this morning practice. We will limit the practice for the rest of the week to those attending the Divisionals meet. That doesn’t mean the rest of the team is done. The following week, we will have All-Stars but we will also have an end of season party. More details to come on the party. We will also have an end of season survey as we look to prepare for our 2022 season. This survey is vital to the team. We did a great many great things this year but we also made some mistakes. We want to improve and better service our pool families. I will have that out to you by the end of the week.
Lastly, we will be having 1-2 fundraisers. As you are aware we grew significantly this year and took on assistant coaches and asked more of our coaches than what was originally expected. The pool pays the salaries of the coaches but the team needs to pay their bonuses. We typically run fundraisers during the season. However, due to the large number of vacations and at the beginning of the season, concerns about Covid they haven’t happened. I will take responsibility for not pushing it more. That said, we do need to 

raise some funds to adequately compensate these coaches. Please, look for information about these fundraising opportunities in the next few days. They will likely be restaurant nights and of course are burger and dog night (at the pool) is coming up soon! Thanks in advance for your help!

Sorry for the long email but there is so many facets to this team and I love everyone of them!

Joel