Former LY swimmer, Justin Stauder, offered up this glimpse of life as a collegiate swimmer. Justin is in his freshman year at James Madison University

"First off, the team is your family. As soon as you arrive on move in day, the upperclassman are already there, waiting to grab all your stuff and carry it to your room. It’s really nice to be part of a group so fast in such a new place right off the bat. Pretty much you do everything with the team, practice, eat, study, and alot of other stuff. The training atmosphere is very intense; everyone trains hard and together. If you stop on the wall, you automatically get yelled at by everyone else. There’s never ever any stopping on the wall or sitting out and stretching, or missing a set. If you miss anything you’re on the hot seat and plus you have to stay after to make it up. If you don’t make the interval, you just swim straight through it, you don’t stop. Like this morning we had 15 100s on 1:10 and there’s no way I can make those with my leg being messed up so I had to do a straight 1500 as fast as I could. It’s tough, but it’s what you have to do. And when we do all out stuff, you don’t hold back for the last one; you go all out on all of them. If you hold back until the last one and everyone else is hurting themselves on all of ‘em, and you go some really good time and beat everyone on the last one, they get mad because you weren’t working hard on the ones leading up to that one. That is pretty much how it goes at practice. You hurt yourself or get busted by your teammates. We also do a heck load of kicking, like we do at least 10 100s kick on 1:45 after warm up everyday. Then once a week we have a 600 kick for time. We aren’t allowed to miss practice at all. There aren’t any excuses, like even though I had a broken leg, I was doing 1500 to 2000 abs on the pool deck then hopping on a bike. You can’t just skip randomly whenever you feel like it."

SO, if you hope to swim in college, be sure you are getting yourself prepared!  Swim hard and don't stand around when practice is going on.

Also, as an aside, James Madison voted to do away with their men’s swimming program after this year in order to comply with Title Nine requirements. We encourage EVERYONE, swimmers and parents alike, to write to James Madison expressing your disgust with this decision and let them know you are removing James Madison’s name as a beneficiary in your will if they don’t reverse this decision. Can anyone get the NCAA to address the REAL issue involved in title nine - 85 football scholarships .... for a game you only need 11 people to play .... oh, don’t get me started ..Lisa..