The Proctor High School pool has been around for many decades. So long, in fact, that it still has a dungeon underneath it. It is in good working condition (the pool that is not the dungeon), but the question of remodeling the pool has been floating around within the school district; new Minnesota State High School League regulations have deemed the pool too shallow.

    The shallow end of the pool is only four feet deep; too shallow to safely dive in. Proctor’s girls swim team has compensated for this, learning to perform “shallow dives,” which is exactly what it sounds like: diving into shallow water. Schools with deeper pools have swimmers who don’t practice this dive, and therefore those schools back out of some meets.

    The Proctor team has no true diving area. This causes them to lose a great deal of points at meets, because they get zero points for not diving. At one meet, the girls lost by only ten points to Superior, who had obtained fifty of their points from their diving team.

    As much as the district would like to give the girls a new swimming pool, there are no plans for changing or improving the pool. The money isn’t there, and the pool isn’t actually broken. It takes approximately one-hundred thousand dollars to deepen pools by one foot, and the only things the pool are affecting are the medley race (where the swimmers start in the pool instead of diving in) and the dive team.

    Not only is the pool too shallow for diving, but the ceiling is too low. When Proctor had a dive team, students often hit their head on the ceiling as they dived.

    Proctor’s pool also contains only four lanes. Many pools have eight full lanes, and during practice the girls are forced to share lanes with others. Because of this over-crowding, the girls aren’t able to work as hard as they could be. Rather, they are focusing on pacing themselves to avoid swimming into their teammates.

    The last problem is both a blessing and a curse: the pool is only twenty yards long, as opposed to other schools, which have twenty-five yard pools. This causes the girls to swim five laps of the pool, instead of the normal four. For this reason, the Proctor girls have far more practice turning, giving them an edge at meets.

    The pool also plays mind games with the other teams. They have to remember to turn and swim the final lap, or risk losing any lead they may have. On medleys they swap from end-to-end when they change racers.

    Unfortunately, the twenty-yard pool makes it difficult to mentally prepare for larger pools. Senior Jenny Asanovich said, “…but you adjust and still do well.”

    This seventy-year pool isn’t going anywhere soon, though. The girls will have to just keep swimming.