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Sports

In Swim League, County Has a Large Talent Pool

Competition and participation is at all-time high, league official says.

As the Montgomery County Swim League’s finest raced in the 2011 season’s first all-star event on Tuesday in Rockville, league officials and county coaches reflected on the state of the sport in the county.

Hosted by the , 79 of the league’s 89 teams combined to send about 305 swimmers to the 33rd Coaches Invitational Long Course Meet.

Typically, MCSL swimmers race in 25-meter pools. The long course meet challenges swimmers with an Olympic-size pool of 50 meters.

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As the first highlight event of the season, the meet helps shine a light on the strength of swimming in Montgomery County, said Martin Cohen, MCSL board member and competition committee chairman.

“We’re at a high point in terms of number of teams and we’ve been there for a couple of years,” Cohen said. “This whole metropolitan area is probably one of the stronger swimming areas in the country. ... If you look at local swimming, this is a hot bed.”

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The nature of the sport requires competitiveness, but the kids who swim year round only up the ante, Rockville Rays head coach Cara Chuang said.

“I think our county has a really, really good, solid, foundation for club swimming, which transfers into MCSL and makes it a really competitive league,” she said.

The league is home to around 10,000 swimmers, by Cohen's estimate. Some teams feature as many as 250 participants, while other have as few as 50, he said.

Many of those swimmers train year-round with club teams and then participate in MCSL during the summer months. Some of the elite swimmers have gone on to participate in the Olympic trials, Cohen said.

As the older swimmers attempt to qualify for the trials, many of the younger swimmers are opening the eyes of their coaches, Fallsmead Sharks head coach Emily McWilliams said.

“A lot of kids have gone on to Olympic trials over the years—older kids primarily—but there’s some really phenomenal up-and-coming younger kids that I think are going to take the swimming world by storm,” she said.

This can only bode well for the MCSL, especially as the 2012 Olympic games in London approach. The league always sees a spike in participation following an Olympic year, Cohen said.

“The year after [the summer games] you always see it—you hit a high point," Cohen said. "And we did again [in 2009].”

The reason, however, isn’t necessarily because kids suddenly dream of becoming the next Michael Phelps, McWilliams said. “The reason a lot of kids start is simply because they want to have fun with their friends.”

For more information on the MCSL, go to: http://www.mcsl.org.

For results from the Long Course Invitational, go to: http://www.mcsl.org/results/2011/results.php.

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