The Squamish Pirates Swim Club recently wrapped their summer season in which they had 45 of 57 swimmers qualify for the summer provincial competition.
The club, which teaches a variety of skill levels for swimming, earned 14 medals at the competition, including six gold medals, three silver and five bronze.
“We had probably one of our strongest summers yet which is pretty exciting,” said Kelly Kaye, the head coach of the club. “We had our strong showing yet as far as qualifiers for provincials.”
Kaye said she started as a coach for the club about 20 years ago.
“I was doing that while at university and I just fell in love with coaching,” she said.
Since then, she’s coached for a few other teams in the Sea to Sky region, but returned to the Squamish Pirates around six years ago.
“It’s been completely full circle and it's just so neat now to see it all come together,” she said about having both the winter season and summer season mesh together.
Kaye said that when she first started coaching with the Pirates, there were only about 30 kids in total. Nowadays, she said the club has “well over” 100 kids who participate.
The programming, Kaye said, starts with developmental swimming and then moves toward competitive swimming. Developmental swimming would include activities like stroke development, whereas competitive swimming would have kids training for competitions and potentially getting noticed by universities, she said. The age range for the club is from four to 17 years old.
As it stands, there is currently a waitlist to join the club, but that doesn’t mean the club won’t try to help.
“I’m a ‘yes’ person,” Kaye said with a laugh. “So the more, the better.”
“I believe we are already waitlisted on parts of our program, but a waitlist doesn't necessarily mean that they won't get in. We just need to shuffle stuff around and try to pull people in as we can.”
Finally, Kaye added that the current success of the club comes not just from her but the whole team including the coaches who helped at the summer compeition: Grace Mackie, Brad Hankewich, Ella Guerin, Ceilidh Lawton and Brian McDonald.
“There's no way that this program would be successful without a super strong board,” she said. “And my staff is just unbelievable this year, my assistant coaches were amazing.”
For more information about the Squamish Pirates Swim Club, please visit the club''s website at SquamishPirates.com.
