Small in Number but Big in Spirit

Numbers don’t lie, so the Los Angeles Dorsey boys’ and girls’ swim teams have come to accept the hard truth.

“My teams will never win a meet,” Coach Doug Brown said, lamenting the fact that the Dons have only two boys and four girls on their varsity swim teams, despite a school enrollment of more than 2,000.

Dorsey, winless in five meets, is not the only school in the Southland forced by a limited number of swimmers to focus instead on individual achievements.

“I always say, ‘We participated. We lost the meet, but we won the races.’ We have to do that,” Brown said.

But no team in the Southland is as small as that at Irvine Tarbut V’Torah, where sophomore Danielle Arad is the team.

Arad and her coach, Annie O’Reilly, are in the process of establishing the Lions’ swim program with the 15-year-old as its foundation.

“It took a lot to start it the first year, sending letters and calling the CIF, but it was worth it,” Arad said. “I’m starting something at the school, and eventually, I really want to develop this to be a strong team.”

In the meantime, she lives the nomadic life of a lone, freelance competitor.

“It’s literally her and me,” said O’Reilly, Tarbut V’Torah’s cross-country coach and activities director. “We jump in my car and go.”

Like other swimmers, freelance athletes must meet time standards and compete in a minimum of six meets in a season to qualify for the Southern Section preliminaries.

“I never went into a meet and wished to win it, because I couldn’t,” Arad said. “It’s more about the experience and setting my goals. Basically, every meet is practice for the next meet, and most of the time, I stay focused.”

Arad is not affiliated with any league and swims in “home” meets on days that Anaheim Esperanza competes, at the Aztecs’ pool, in an outside lane.

“Some kids are confused when they see me up on the starting blocks,” she said. “They say, ‘Who’s that girl? Now, people pretty much know that I’m a one-man team.”

Arad won the 500-yard freestyle at the Southern Section Division IV championships as a freshman in 2003.

Her success has generated interest in swimming among her classmates and raised hopes that Tarbut V’Torah may have a team of 10 to 20 swimmers next year, when on-campus construction of a Jewish community center that will include a pool is completed.

The lack of an on-campus pool is a factor for many schools with small swim teams. Dorsey, for instance, is among 39 of the 49 Los Angeles City Section schools without on-campus facilities.

Pasadena Mayfair is a Southern Section school with seven swimmers who never practice together, because there is no pool at the school. Instead, they disperse to three clubs to swim each day.

“If we had a facility on campus, we’d probably have about 60 kids,” said Amanda McAndrew, Mayfair’s coach. “It’s hard for our relays because they never practice together. We try to go over it at meets, but you can’t do much in 30 minutes of warm-ups.”

The Ventura St. Bonaventure boys’ team, led by seniors John Paul Oliver and William Craig, was second in the team competition going into the final race of the Southern Section Division IV championships last season. However, without a 400 freestyle relay team, the Seraphs had to settle for seventh.

Oliver won the division’s 200 free title and was third in the 100 butterfly, and Craig was second in the 200 individual medley and 100 backstroke. But with only two other swimmers, the Seraphs were left short-handed because participants may compete in only two individual events and two relays per meet.

“The bad thing is, there are times when you just don’t have enough swimmers,” Mayfair senior Tiffany Ikeda said.

“You just learn to live with it and make the best of the situation.”

Although it’s a struggle at times, life isn’t all bad for tiny teams.

Coaches and swimmers alike enjoy close-knit relationships based on mutual respect and trust.

Arad and O’Reilly, for example, have become like sisters, often confiding in each other in conversations about everything but swimming. And Brown, the Dorsey coach, knows his swimmers benefit from the individual attention they receive.

That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t also like to see them win a meet.

“I’m a firm believer,” he said, “that if anyone says that winning doesn’t matter, then they’ve never won.”