Sweet incentive for St. Charles swimmers

When most of us think about filling a sink, we're usually talking about putting water into the basin so we can wash dishes or hands.

Swimmers spend the better part of their lives in the water, and boys swimmers have become lungfish the past two weeks.

So when they think of filling a sink, they want the kind that comes with ice cream and a cherry on top.

And that's how it's been for ages in St. Charles, where the reward for a solid training performance during Holiday Break is a trip to one of the local Colonial restaurants, where a Kitchen Sink is ordered.

"The Kitchen Sink was around when I was in high school," St. Charles grad and current St. Charles North boys swim coach Rob Rooney said. "(Dave) Bart and (Bob) Teichart) started it. Joe (Cabel) carried it forth when he took the job at East. It's what I know, the tradition I grew up with, so I carried that on when I took the job here."

To qualify for a Kitchen Sink, a swimmer has to attend all practices over Winter Break. That means he's going to swim a lot -- more than enough to worry about what a sinkful of ice cream will do to his training habits.

"That's the reward for putting in their time," Rooney said. "It's a badge of honor to get that little treat at the end of Christmas training. Of course the true treat is at the end of the season. The real reward comes at February."

Rooney said 21 swimmers qualified to sink a Kitchen Sink last year, and that a similar number are on pace this year, with a couple of practices yet to go.

"It's been a good time to get some uninterrupted training done," Rooney said. "The yardage has gone up and the intensity's gone up. We've put more emphasis on the weight room over break than we have in the past."

In the days immediately prior to the start of the increased training, Rooney said he hoped for some bonding to take place. This isn't just a St. Charles North situation. Most teams go through this. The swim season begins just after Thanksgiving, and teams usually have three or four competitive dates before the start of winter training.

"Even college kids, when they go away on their training trips to wherever they go, get that feeling too," Rooney said. "It's that whole opportunity to do what you're supposed to do training-wise and to get away from school and other distractions and really focus on training."

Rooney said the average day involves somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 yards of swimming. For those who have put in the work in the off-season, this workload is set to hone their talents, to create the base from which the end of season resting process known as tapering takes place.

Every high school team has athletes who do not compete or train in the long off-season. Even these athletes will benefit from the hard training. But as all the top swimmers move through some form of this increased training, the chance to catch up is nearly impossible.

"It doesn't make up for lost time," Rooney said. "That's not a feasible task. This does take care of the kids who put in the team. It will, of course, take care of the kids who didn't put in the time too, but maybe not to the same degree. The yardage we swim is going to take a toll, and the kids who start it in better shape are better equipped to handle it and work through it."

Training is one thing -- performance in competition is another. St. Charles North joins Marmion and 14 other top schools on Saturday at the Evanston Invitational.

"For us to carry this training and then to walk into Evanston -- that's going to be a task for the North boys," Rooney said.

The Evanston meet uses the Power Points system authored by the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association (NISCA.) Each event has a maximum of 200 points, and scoring is based upon the performance of an athlete in each event. Rather than score for first or second place, the fastest swimmers are rewarded with the largest points totals.

"Your deepest team or your best team in the state may not win this meet," Rooney said. "You get a couple of studs on one team who can score an astronomical number of points, and their team can run away with the meet. I think you'll see Neuqua Valley run away with this meet. A guy like Brian Alden can go in there and clean clock on the meet."

Even though their best performances have rarely come at this curtain-raiser for the second half of the season, Rooney remains fixed on the end of the season.

Last year at the Evanston Invitational, St. Charles North finished ninth behind champion New Trier but was fifth in the state meet and missed a state trophy by 3 points.

"The North boys are pretty good at the end of the year tapering," Rooney said. "At that point, they will know they've done everything they need to do. But that one last hurdle that we need to get past is to get on the blocks dead-beat tired and compete as a top-tier team."

That may take place Saturday. Regardless of what happens, the North Stars figure to be back and ready to go for the Feb. 22-23 state meet. They will certainly have thrown everything into their preparation.

Yes, even the Kitchen Sink.