The Yuma Heat is on fire
A local swim team is breaking records and encouraging kids to work hard for their dreams, 13 on your side’s Jasmine Arenas has an inside look at this local team that is making Yuma a competitive force in the world of aquatics.
“Swimming is also a sport where people lose by milliseconds..If you take a stopwatch out and you click it as fast as you can, that is usually about 15 milliseconds….” said Yuma Heat coach, Mark Van Voorst.
10-year-old Nick Acero is a competitive force for the heat.
“When I am in competition when I am actually racing I’m only thinking about myself and how I’m gonna do…”
It might just be one thousandth of a second, but to these athletes every little second counts.
“We have athletes who do very well individually and then we have athletes who have started lower, but have made huge progress in short periods of time,” shared Van Voorst about his team.
The Yuma heat started 2018 hot.
Sending the most kids ever in team history to the Junior Olympics an event they also hosted this year for the first time since 2016.
Coach Van Voorst shares why this team is beginning a winning culture, “We really focus on our goals, so every practice we practice technique, every practice we practice strong aerobic swimming, every practice we practice all the fine details about what makes a swimmer fast.”
With these techniques they were able to walk out of the Junior Olympics with a third place finish against two of the biggest teams in Arizona.
On top of that, just last weekend, 16 of their swimmers competed in the Age Group State Championships in Tucson, breaking several team records and achieving far western qualification times but this team has developed a culture of swimmers who crave more than just a title.
Most of them would like to continue their swimming career in college and go to the Olympics.
But this team carries a greater message behind the water cap and goggles:
“Its about having kids understand that things do not come easy, you have to work for them and the harder you work the more valuable the achievements are,” shared Coach Van Voorst.
So those seconds count even when they are not competing in the water.
