U of A swim team bring home medals

Once not considered a serious competitor in the CanWest division, the University of Alberta’s swim team has made great strides this season to attain a level of respectability that has alluded them for almost two decades.

This past weekend the three-day Canada West Swimming Championships took place at Kinsmen Sports Centre in Edmonton. The favourites to win the team trophies on both the men’s and women’s sides were the defending CanWest champions, UBC, and the defending national champions, the University of Calgary.

UBC was able to defend their CanWest crowns by margins of more than 100 points in both the men’s and women’s rankings. But this year the U of A was able to stay competitive with a third-place finish for the women and a second-place finish for the men, finishing one spot ahead of their rivals at the U of C.

“Really I think everything went as well as it could have,” U of A head coach Bill Humby said.

“You’re never going to have it perfect where everyone swims 100 per cent in every race. We’ve done okay in the past but we really did a great job of getting into the A finals, winning medals, and getting up this morning and swimming really strongly when (we’re) tired.”

The U of A’s top swimmers included former UBC student Erin Miller who won three gold medals and broke a number of CanWest records and team captain Brian Yakiwchuk, who won two gold medals in his final year with the team.

Humby was named coach of the year for the men’s side — a deserving honour for a man who has been with the team for the past five and a half years and turned the program around. This is Humby’s sixth season in Edmonton and he has put together an all around strong Bears team that’s at the highest ranking they’ve reached in almost two decades. This year marked for the highest finish at the CanWest finals since 1995 for the Green and Gold’s male team.

Humby envisioned this kind of success when he joined the team after spending eight and a half years as an assistant coah at the U of C. But at that time the U of A wasn’t taken seriously as a contender in swimming. It took Humby until this season to finally change people’s opinion of the Bears swim team, with a defeat of the defending national champions from U of C early in the year and a second-place finish over the weekend.

“We’ve just been saying over the years we do work as hard as (the U of C) does. There’s nothing we don’t have here that they have. They’re both associated with national training centres and I think we’ve got the same support team here, the same level of coaching, and the university’s really good at supporting the team,” Humby said.

“The athletes here don’t take it for granted what they’ve got. If they make the team, they’re respectful of the fact that they had to earn their spot on the team. They take kind of a pride and an ownership in the team that I’m not sure the other schools quite have. They can be primadonnas, they think they deserve stuff and we don’t have that.”

The next step for the U of A is looking ahead to another strong showing at the CIS national championships in Montreal, Feb. 23-25.

“I just told the team we’ve got 24 days, 15 hours and 54 minutes until (national championships). It’s a little bit less now but they’ve got two weeks now where they can make some changes — whether they need to do some hard work, do some technical work or just mentally figure out how to swim our races better, we’ve got a few things we can change,” Humby said.

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