ROANOKE, Va. – After about two months out of the pool, a 5 a.m. wake up call is nothing for the CCA Marlins. “Swimmers are like getting fish out of the water, its just not possible,” head coach Amina Serir said.
The year-round swim club is one of the first teams to get back in the water since the Coronavirus pandemic.
“Swimming just makes me happy, to get back in for an hour or fifty minutes at four in the morning, it’s great,” Lord Botetourt senior Miranda Kirtley said.
However, summer swimming through the Roanoke Valley Aquatic Association is a different story.
“I know RVAA as a league decided back in May that we were not going to host a formal swim season,” RVAA board member Shannon Hoopes said.
Instead, they left it up to their member pools to decide if they wanted to have an independent season.
"My team at Olympic Park with the Knights of Columbus, we decided if there was anything we could do for our swimmers, we wanted to."
But that’s not the case for all the pools in the area. However, the CCA Marlins and Olympic Park are taking precautions to ensure that their practices are as safe as can be.
"Right now we have been following the guidelines, one swimmer per lane, only 50 minutes so we can clean up between practices,' Serir said. “But it’s been so great seeing how much the kids are more dedicated, more enthusiastic about it, because they’ve been deprived from it.”