Joining the Swim Team — Cabot University

You recently joined the swimming team at Cabot University. How will you navigate the water?

Plot

Cabot University  ·  Kalispell, Montana Joining theSwim Team Twenty weeks. Thirty places.Everyone here was here before you. The Situation Five thirty in the morning, forty-one degrees, and somebody you have never met texted you at 5:12 to tell you which door is unlocked. Inside there are eight lanes of flat unlit water and about thirty people who have all been here longer than you have. Lane order is decided today. Practice starts early no matter who you are. You made the roster. That is all you have. There are thirty places per team and there used to be forty. Everybody in this building knows somebody who went. What This Is There is no quest and no way to win. There is a season, it runs on a schedule, and it does not wait for you. You decide who you are. A walk-on who fought onto the roster, a recruited freshman with expectations attached, a transfer carrying whatever you left behind, a returning upperclassman, or the fastest person in the building. You pick your stroke, your events and how good you actually are — in plain words, not numbers — and the first message tells you how. Every race is decided by your stats and a dice roll. Nobody wins because the scene would be better that way. A lane, a relay leg, a place on the travel squad — each one is taken from somebody with a name, and they find out. Twenty Weeks September to November. Volume. Doubles, weights, permanent hunger, a body that never stops hurting. Dual meets nobody rests for. December. The Flathead Invitational. Three days, and the first honest look at where anybody actually stands. Winter break. The training trip. The highest volume of the year, nowhere to go and nobody to see but each other. Whatever this team becomes, it becomes there. February. Two weeks of taper, the shave-down, and then the conference championships. Everything before this was preparation. March. Nationals, for the two or three who qualify. For everyone else it just stops. If You Have Never Swum A Set You do not need to know any of this. People on the deck will tell you, usually impatiently. But it reads easier if you do. The set is written on a whiteboard before practice. 8 x 50 kick @ :55 means eight fifty-yard swims, legs only, with a new one starting every fifty-five seconds. Swim it faster and you rest longer. That is the whole bargain. Distances are in yards. The pool is twenty-five yards long, so a 50 is down and back, a 100 is four lengths, and the mile is sixty-six of them. A heat is a group racing at once — four in practice, eight at a meet. The pace clock is the big clock on the wall everybody times themselves off. Lane order is where you stand in your lane, fastest at the front. Nobody announces it and everybody reads it. Moving up means somebody moved down. Taper and shave. The last two weeks before the championship you train less and less, which feels like falling apart and is how you get fast. Then the whole team shaves down in the locker room the night before. It is the one ritual this sport has. Three Ways To Play Dungeon Mind off Cheapest. The story runs on the prompt alone. The codex is not read, so records, rosters, the season calendar and the race formula are all invisible to the model and it will invent more of the world than it recalls. Fine for a light read, rough on continuity. Dungeon Mind on, codex only The model can read the whole world — the roster, the rivals, the season schedule, the records, who wants whom. Races are resolved in the narration rather than by the numbers. The best option if you are here for the people and want the swimming to stay in the background. Dungeon Mind on, all functions  ·  intended Everything above, plus dice. Your stats and a d20 produce an actual finishing time for every swimmer in the heat, and the scene is written to match it. Weekly training rolls decide whether you improve. You can lose a relay leg, miss a cut by three hundredths, and have a season that does not go the way you wanted. Who Is Already Here A senior sprinter three hundredths off a national qualifying time and out of seasons. A junior who is the hardest worker on the roster and the first to tell you. A sophomore who is the only person here who likes the mile. A captain who is everybody's first call and nobody's. A freshman walk-on who checks the lane sheet every morning to see whether her name is still on it. A co-captain who tells people the truth and then stays in the room. The fastest swimmer in the building, who throws away more races than anyone. A head coach who read the cut list out himself, one at a time, and has praised four people in twenty-two years. None of them are waiting for you. Several of them wanted the place you are standing in. This is not a story about being the fastest. It is about twenty weeks, six mornings a week, and what you are worth to the people standing on the same wet tile. Cabot University is an adult post-secondary institution. Every student is 18 or older. Every character in this story is an adult.

Opening scene

Mon, Sep 14 | Early morning | 41°F, clear | Aquatic CenterWK1|PH:PRE|FOC:--|PR:0/6|PQ:0|NM:Oct 10 Green vs Gold The phone went off at 5:12. Rosalind Cale north door. the main one's locked till six bring two suits. one to warm up in 05:12 By twenty-five past five the deck was half full and the coaches' office was still dark. Eight lanes of flat water, the filters running, half the overhead lights on. People stood around in parkas over their suits, stretching and yawning and not talking much yet. Your bag was on the bench by lane five and your parka was already open over your suit. Nobody had said anything to you yet, but people had looked. A broad-shouldered guy with black curls dropped off the starting block in lane four and walked straight over, barefoot on the wet tile, grinning like this was the best thing that had happened to him all week. "Okay. New person." He stopped close enough to drip on your bag. "Coach walks in in about four minutes, and after that nobody gets to ask anything, so I need three things now. Who are you, what do you swim, and do I need to be worried." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "Zavi. Sprint. The fast one, until further notice." He said it at an ordinary volume. On a quiet deck at half five, that was loud enough for everybody. On the block in lane four, a tall blonde woman kept working one shoulder in slow circles. On the bench by the whiteboard, a redhead with marker ink up her forearm had stopped writing. A freshman with a mess of chestnut curls was staring openly. Rosalind Cale was reading the lane sheet taped to the wall. "Take your time," Zavi said. "three and a half minutes now."

Characters

Tags: School SchoolLife College Sports Athlete Female Male AnyPOV Modern SliceOfLife SlowBurn Friendship Student Senior Junior

Chats Started: 131

By: deeenny

Stories

Redirecting to KAGESEKAI...