Sports
Germonds Pool Hosts Clarkstown Town Swim Meet
Free for Clarkstown residents, the meet gave swimmers a chance to wind down from the summer season.
The Clarkstown Town Swim Meet was held at Germonds Pool Saturday morning, offering Clarkstown residents a chance to playfully compete and children a chance to show off what they learned this summer. About 25 people, mostly children under 12, swam in the event.
“The town swim meet is a really great opportunity for patrons to come and participate in a swim meet,” said Claire Neville, the head coach and head lifeguard at Germonds Pool, who directed the event. “They get to swim all the type of events that somebody would swim in an actual official swim meet. Most of the people we have coming are swim team members.”
Germonds Pool lifeguards and swimming coaches kept times for each swim lane, joked with children and made sure the swimmers were safe in the water. Medals were given for each heat, so some children accumulated as many as six.
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Germonds Pool runs the B meets of the USS Rockland County Summer Swim League every Wednesday morning. Neville said with that season ending this past weekend, it was time for the annual town meet.
The meet is a recruiting event, of sorts. For children to be eligible for the team, they must be able to swim from one side of the pool to the other. Neville said many children enroll in summer lessons and test themselves at the town meet to see how they have progressed.
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“It’s a great opportunity for them to come and interact with lifeguards, interact with the coaches, and see if swimming maybe is something for them,” she said. “A lot of kids join swimming after they come to this meet. Some of them may be in swim lessons at first and then come participate and think that it’s really fun. So they join private teams or they come back and swim for us in the summer.”
Monica Feffer brought her daughter, Aliza, to the town meet. Besides watching her daughter swim, she also participated.
“It’s a great event,” she said. “It would be great if they could publicize it more. You could get another hundred families just by publicizing it more.”
Feffer had enrolled Aliza in summer swim classes.
“It was fun,” she said. “She learned a lot this summer.”
