Highlight: Student, Coach, and Athlete

By Travis Lott

My name is Travis Lott and I’m a junior here at Southern Virginia University. The reason I came to this school was because of the swim team. This is the team’s third year and I’ve been here for each season. Previous to this I also swam in high school meaning I’ve had swimming as a part of my life for almost 10 years now. And last year, for the 2020–2021 season, Parry McCluer high school in Buena Vista, Virginia got a new swim coach: me.

Last year the swim coach at Parry McCluer decided to stop coaching and there was an opening for his position. I was able to get the job as head coach and had Breanne Moore as my assistant. However, because of COVID-19, we weren’t able to have a season. This was really frustrating, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

This summer I started working on the team and spent several months trying to figure out if I could make it work for this school year. We got an agreement with the director of the pool in October and were able to start swimming just a few weeks before our first meet.

Everything about being the high school swim coach became difficult. I wasn’t able to attend most of the practices due to my class schedule, the individual who did end up doing most of the everyday coaching was very difficult to contact due to my schedule. They had a meet that got canceled because of weather, because of COVID-19, and other scheduling issues. This meant that our short meet schedule was even shorter than planned.

I had started out the season with four girls on the team, but by the end of the season, I was down to two, due to injuries. All of them swam well in the meets they were able to attend, but only one swimmer was able to go to each one that we had. By some miracle, we didn’t come last in the region with only 2 swimmers.

For region, even though two of the girls were injured, we were all able to still participate. Out of the four girls, two are freshmen and two are sophomores. The two who were able to swim were the two freshmen. One of the girls was able to get 7th in both of her races, which at only 14-years-old is impressive.

My favorite thing about being their coach was getting to cheer them on during their races. More than ninety percent of the races my girls swam they dropped time in and it was so much fun to watch and get to be a part of it.

We all had fun and it was a great way to close off the season. Now I’m looking towards next season which will start up in the fall with the goal of being able to be at practices. I don’t know what I’ll have to do, but I’m hoping I can figure it out.