Up for the challenge
A short-distance swimmer with Lake City High School is gaining speed from her lifelong commitment to the sport.
Sarah Shields started swimming when she was 3 years old. She got her first taste of competition at age 11 and was hooked. Now, as a senior at North Idaho Christian School, she hopes to keep competing. She has her sights on college-level competition with a new swim program at the University of Idaho and plans to major in sports medicine or physical therapy.
“It’s quite a commitment for these swimmers,” said Bob Wood, LCHS head coach. “People don’t understand that to go on and want to swim in college, you’ve got to be dedicated.”
Wood has seen Shields’ dedication through four years of steady training during the season and continued practice year-round with the Coeur d’Alene Area Swim Team. He’s confident she’ll make an impact on any college team.
At 5-foot-11, Shields fits the mold of most college and world-class swimmers, he said. The jump into college-level competition would mean shifting from one or two practices a day to all-day training and steady weight lifting.
But she’s up for the challenge.
“You have to better yourself and nobody else can do it but you,” Shields said.
As part of the 38-member swim team, she attends every practice and meet she can. And she enjoys waking at 4:30 a.m. to make each weekday practice from 5 to 7 a.m. The swim team endures grueling work, with dry-land training and lake swimming early in the season. Some team members keep up through weight training, but most of the work is just going back and forth in the pool at 24-Hour Fitness in Coeur d’Alene.
If people don’t swim at meets or practice, they sink from the team.
But each practice adds up, said Shields, and the payoff comes during competition.
“It’s nice to know in competition that your swims do matter, not just to yourself but to the team,” she said.
Her best competition times this year have been 25:07 seconds in the 50 freestyle, 55:46 seconds on the 100 freestyle and 1:11:63 seconds in the breast stroke.
She said her success depends on the time, energy and sacrifice put into the sport. Much of her time is spent altering strokes and technique to shave tenths of a second off her race times.
She remembers breaking 25 seconds at state last year and winning the competition with a time of 24:77.
“It’s very self-satisfying,” she said. “It just makes you feel really good that all that time you’ve put in over the last year or whatever has had some sort of benefits and you can somewhat see the prize at the end of the trail.”
Recent training has been focused on district competitions to be held this weekend and the state competition against about 30 teams next weekend. Shields hopes to shave more than two seconds off her 100 freestyle to beat the state record of 52 seconds.
Wood has high hopes for the team and said he’s confident of good swim times with Shields leading the group with her two co-captains.
Shields often cheers teammates from the sidelines as they compete and while she’s grown into her position as captain over the years, Wood said she’s always had a “buoyant personality.”
“Leaders kind of emerge over a period of time,” Wood said. “She’s emerged as one of the best team captains we’ve ever had.”
Shields said her lead is through simple motivation that goes the distance with team members. She’s often first to give a compliment to help them stick out the rough practices and keep inching toward a personal best.
“Regardless of how we do, I’m still always going to be proud of my team,” she said.