Announcements: Just as a reminder that on Thursday April 24^th Poseidon will be holding its annual awards ceremony at Robious Elementary school at 6:30, there will be NO practice for the entire team. The next day, on Friday, we will be heading to the Chesterfield mall for our Pizza and Pottery night, which will begin at 6 and continue until 9 if necessary. One last date to remember is May 1^st, goal sheets are due.

Monday Meeting Recap: Today was a short meeting in comparison to the rest of the meeting, but I made the sacrifice of shorting the meeting because of the busy week, which is another reason for our topic, sacrifice. In sport whether it’s swimming or not you must make a sacrifice. In terms of a definition we defined sacrifice as giving up something in return for something greater. Some examples we found in general are time, hanging out with friends, sleep, and other sports. All these examples can be stretched across all sport activities.

In terms of swimming we emphasized what could be sacrifice in practice to make us better prepared at the end of the season and that was the little pains and hurts that may creep into our heads during practice. Learning to deal with these little pains, push past the hurt and make the sacrifice will only help us when we get to meets and all those feelings start taking over our body in a race. Instead of getting out to go to the bathroom, stretching, grabbing some water just to rest, we need to make that sacrifice and push ourselves to the end of the set.

The famous coach Vince Lombardi gives us three ways to think about sacrifice:

            Sacrifice leads to success: All the long hours of training only equip us with better tools to hand in there when we are faced with tough odds.

            Use failures as stepping stones: We all know that it hurts to fall short of our goals. However, when you use a failure to your advantage, it can become merely a stepping stone on the road to victory.

            Pay the price: Greatness is worth the cost. Great achievements require courage, determination, drive, and the willingness to pay the price.

If anything we do in life or in swimming is worth the cost, put a price tag on it, how much are you willing to pay? Will you make the sacrifice?