Every lane of the pool was chock full of student swimmers at the South Central Area Championships last Friday. Swimmers from Kenai, Seward, Soldotna and Homer stretched and did practice laps ahead of the time trials at Kenai Central High School.
Seward Tsunami Swim Club President Julie Wilder stood next to the bleachers in the viewing area, overlooking the pool. Her club just wrapped up Swim-a-Thon, its biggest fundraiser.
“We used to dream of raising $30 thousand,” Wilder said. “And then last year, we hit 38 (thousand). This year, we hit 40 (thousand).”
Wilder said the fundraiser, and the club, have gotten a boost from the success of one of its members — 2021 Olympic Gold Medalist Lydia Jacoby.
The club is where Jacoby got her start, at age six. From there, she catapulted into a decorated swimming career, most famously taking home the gold for her 100-meter breaststroke in Japan when she was just 17 years old.
“As soon as she qualified for the Olympic trials, other kids would come to our home meet and they wanted to talk to Lydia, or get her autograph,” Wilder said. “Or just the whispers: ‘There’s a famous person …’ (those) kind of whispers going on any time she was around.”
Jacoby’s swimming in Texas, now. Still, Wilder said that win has brought a lot of visibility to the club in the years since.
Back then, the club had between 50 and 60 swimmers, ranging in age from 5-18. Swimmers compete with the club when the school teams are in the off-season.
But then the pandemic hit. The swim club cut one season short and the Seward pool closed, sending Jacoby up to Anchorage to train. Jacoby’s Olympic trials — and the Olympics itself — were pushed back, too. The next season, Wilder said, they only let returning swimmers in.
And then — they had 80 kids join.
“Right now, we’re at about 75,” Wilder said. “So, it created visibility. It also opened doors for us. We sent our coach with Lydia. He saw lots of different training technologies that people are using, different training methods.”
Wilder said the swim club’s summer swim camp, too, has tripled in size.
Wilder has two kids in the program, ages 13 and 15. She’s been watching the club grow for seven years.
She said there’s a lot of hometown pride in what it’s been able to achieve from such a small corner of the state.
“It does seem random, doesn’t it? I mean I think people even find it random that Lydia came from such a small town,” she said. “And then just the fact that it’s been such an award winning program in Seward.”
Out of the pool, the club is fighting to keep its pool open.
Seward’s pool is operated and staffed by the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District. And facing financial shortfalls, the district is considering cutting pool managers and closing some of its pools to balance its budget, in addition to cutting theater techs and other positions.
At a recent school board meeting, Jacoby’s mom, Leslie Jacoby, representing the swim club, asked the board to keep the pools open. A petition she made has over 5,000 signatures.
“Thank you for the ways you helped my daughter to reach her Olympic dreams,” she said. “We have many athletes close to their goal of achieving an Olympic trial cut for the 2024 Paris Olympics. To close our pools would be to abandon the core mission to which KPBSD is funded.”
The district added the cuts, and others, to a balanced budget that will be up for board approval this Monday. But it could still go back on those cuts if it gets additional funding from the state.
The district and the Seward swim club both, meanwhile, have been encouraging people to testify in front of the legislature to ask for more per-student funding. Bills that would increase that base-student allocation are moving through the legislature, now.
