105 Days and 105 Messages That Kept us Together and Strong
Head Coach Olivier Renaud of Whitby Swimming stepped up to inspire a team of 130 swimmers and their families for 105 days when the pandemic closed local training facilities.
We are a club with swimmers from the pre-competitive level to National and from ages 8 to 50+ Needless to say, when everything shut down in March, our world was turned upside down and inside out. We were swimmers without early morning practices, weekend-long competitions and without each other. Some of these amazing kids went from swimming 8 times a week to nothing. We felt, quite literally, like fish out of water.
From the beginning of the pandemic, Olivier emailed daily inspirational and motivational messages to our swim team. They contained daily workouts, creative challenges like Running to Tokyo (and we did it! As a club, we ran 11,467kms…enough to get to Tokyo!) and IRONMAY; a clever play on an IRONMAN competition. We LOVE competitions!!
Coach Olivier is a very creative person and has done so much for our club’s swimmers. Olivier's idea for a ‘socially distanced contactless bottle drive’ with volunteer swimmers and parents raised money for the club and donated $1,300 to Feed the Need in Durham. He is tireless in his efforts and sometimes raw in his messaging; in a touching way. He wasn’t afraid to address the highs and lows many were experiencing in the first months of the pandemic, including himself.
Olivier’s efforts landed us back in the pool in June on a restricted basis, according to the rules set out by Swimming Canada. Our swimmers swam at the Pan Am Centre in Scarborough and the Boys and Girls Club in Oshawa. His guidance and leadership navigated our swimmers throughout a positive journey, focusing them on new options for training, and coming together in virtual Zoom dryland sessions to keep the team connected and together.
In short, we are so proud of his tireless efforts to keep a swim club together and kids motivated and engaged (and parents too!!) that we wanted to share this ‘good news’ story.
On August 19th, 2020, we presented Olivier with a book of his daily email messages, forever bound, for him to keep. We are grateful and thankful to have him leading our club.