Off to a smooth start

Conley learns quickly, swims well in first year

By Marty Kirkland

Josephine Conley may be one of the smaller members of the Dalton Dolphins, but she’s already making a big difference for the summer swim team.

Just four months after beginning competitive swimming — the Dolphins are the summertime, recreation-league arm of the year-round Carpet Capital Aquatics Club to which Conley also belongs — the 7-year-old who will be a second grader at Brookwood Elementary this year is already impressing her coaches.

“You can see some kids have a feel for the water,” said Marta Hannah, Conley’s age-group coach. “The ones that really place their hands in the right position and can move very smoothly through the water. She’s one of them.”

Hannah said one sure sign of progress for Conley is her quick advancement from the lowest rung of the club’s swimming ladder, Bronze I, to the next step, Bronze II. That required Conley to show an ability to perform the four basic competition strokes: butterfly, breast, back and freestyle. Swimmers must be able to complete 25 yards in both the freestyle and backstroke just to join the Dolphins, Hannah said.

And Conley’s quick understanding of the breaststroke is especially noteworthy, Hannah added.

“Not all 8-and-unders can do that very well,” the coach said. “It’s a lot of details and coordination.”

While she may be new to competitive swimming, Conley is hardly new to the pool.

Her mother, Meda, said Josephine was already taking to the water at 6 months old and she’s been a regular visitor to her grandparents’ pool for fun swims in the past. Without the usual fears about putting her head under the water — Conley even enjoyed snorkeling in Mexico, her mother said — the first-year Dolphin was able to make the switch to competitive swimming without too much trouble.

“I thought, we’ll just go ahead and try this and see how she does,” Meda said. “And she just loved it. Jumped in, took to it, got the strokes really quick. She had never had any kind of swimming lessons ... she just caught on really quick.”

The less-competitive nature of summer meets is giving Conley — who grinned when her mother called her “a fish when it comes to water” — a chance to learn about the rituals of meets. Conley said she false-started in a meet when another swimmer jumped in early, but that’s been one of the few hiccups in an otherwise smooth takeoff with the Dolphins as she has scored in every meet this summer.

Standing a few yards away from the lane where she’d soon help kick off Thursday’s meet with a 25-yard freestyle swim in 8-under competition during Thursday’s Chattanooga Area Swim League meet against visiting Red Bank, she seemed happy just to be at the Dalton Recreation Center’s pool on a hot summer evening.

“Before I even started, I knew freestyle and backstroke,” she said. “The first time I swam, I had no clue what breast and butterfly was.”

Hannah said Conley’s early dedication at practice is one reason she’s been successful — and for that, the coach gave credit to the swimmer’s parents, Meda and Neil, for making sure Conley makes the three-times-a-week, 45-minute sessions available to younger swimmers in the CCAC.

And for her part, Hannah has mastered a veteran coach’s trick of making sure practices seem more like leisure than labor.

“We do a lot of games, but they’re swimming,” she said. “They think they’re playing, but they’re really working the drills and the skills they need to achieve. Let’s dive and do a flip. They do a flip and they’re learning the flip they need to do on the wall.”

Conley said she struggled at first with the technique of the breaststroke, sometimes letting her arms go too far back for an illegal form, but got better with the help of CCAC student assistants like Harris News and Sophia Mendoza.

“It was pretty hard,” Conley said. “My arms would go back here and I would get disqualified. Now I let them go like this. The feet are really hard because you have to train your feet.”

Meda, who teaches at Dalton High, found out about the Dolphins’ need for female swimmers in the youngest age group from a fellow math teacher and figured the transition from swimming just for fun to something a little more serious wouldn’t be too much trouble.

That’s been good news for Dolphins head coach Charles Todd, who also heads up the CCAC, Dalton Middle and Dalton High programs. Restocking is a yearly chore for any swim team that wants to remain consistent — recent summers have seen the Dolphins as one of the best in the CASL — and getting talent early is always a plus.

“We try with our year-round program to keep an influx of young kids swimming year-round,” Todd said. “That gives us an upper hand on some of the other teams in the league. We went four years undefeated (in regular-season meets). That’s been our whole secret in really getting it going — keeping people in the water.”

Conley kept up her scoring streak on Thursday, chipping in four points as she finished fourth in both the 25-yard freestyle and breaststroke events while also swimming on the 8-under girls relay teams that took second.

For her part, Conley believes she’s in it for the long haul.

“I probably want to do it until I’m in high school,” said Conley, who hopes to give tennis and baseball a try someday. “As long as I can.”

In Thursday’s meet, Dalton defeated Red Bank 421-335 to improve to 3-2 in the CASL’s top division.

Top scorers for the Dolphins were Ethan Young, Taylor Dale and Stephen Jones, who each contributed the meet maximum of 19 points.

Dalton’s other leading scorers were Elle Lyles, Jamey Fuller and Omar Farag (17 points); Tanner Storey and Chas Jones (15); Caroline Mathis and Ethan Pence (13); Ricardo Chavez (12); Jonathan Shaheen and Alan Trejo (11); and Alex Mashburn and Austin Mobley (10).

The Dolphins return to the pool on Monday when they host rival Signal Mountain. Diving will be held at 4:30 p.m. at Dalton High’s pool, with the action switching to the Dalton Recreation Center for a 5:30 p.m. start to swimming.

Text Only