Every year as the weather grows colder, the Peddie Swim Team begins the hard work to prepare for Easterns. Easterns is a large swim competition that occurs every year welcoming more than twenty schools from across the North East. The Peddie Swim Team start to focus on preparing for Easterns at the beginning of Winter Term, before lowering their practice intensity in the weeks leading up to the competition. This year, the team moved their training trip from Thanksgiving Break to Winter Break to give them more consistency and an extra edge up. They also do many team building exercises to prepare such as going out to dinner and secret psyche.

Training for Eastern’s is hard work, so why do it? For Morgan Chudd ‘20, Easterns is her favorite part of the swim season. She said, “Easterns is full of fun memories and lots of team bonding, we all take in the last moments together as a team and focus on swimming fast and being together one last time.” RC Ike ‘19 says that he enjoys Easterns, because “The energy is high, and everyone is cheering is so loud you can literally feel the noise in the building. Everyone’s emotions are high, people can be seen crying as they leave the building for potentially the last time they ever swim. It doesn’t matter if you are an underclassmen or an upperclassmen, there’s something surreal about it all.” The entire Peddie Swim team is extremely dedicated to the sport, so for them it doesn’t feel like work. Meera Pawale ‘21 participates on the swim team, because she says “it is the only sport where you are so so so close to all of your teammates and you share such a special bond with them that lasts a lifetime. I spend so much time with all my teammates outside of the pool. It’s a really special bond we all have and it’s so amazing to be part of something bigger than yourself.” For most people I asked, their favorite part of Easterns was cheering on their teammates, and watching them win points for swimming their fastest times.

The Peddie Swim Team did well this year. The majority of the team got their personal bests. In the end, the women’s team placed seventh and the men’s team placed twelfth, out of about fifty teams. Combined, the Peddie Swim Team placed eighth.