This year will be the second season of the De Soto High School swim team, and the athletes are very excited for the upcoming season.

“We have a lot of expectations to do well this season,” said swim team captain senior Erin Sullivan. “We have a ton of freshmen who are super experienced. The majority of our team right now is classified in the varsity lanes, so we have some really good swimmers who are going to do really awesome.”

Sullivan also hopes that the team will become more diverse when competing.

“We definitely want to expand all of our events,” Sullivan said. “Instead of everyone swimming the 350 [freestyle], we want more people to do the 200 [individual medley] or the 500 [freestyle]. I think mainly we need to improve upon expanding and going out of our comfort zones of what we normally do. [We also need to work on] getting better at the butterfly stroke, which everybody really hates, but we should try to do better anyway.”

Sullivan thinks that the coaches will put more pressure on the team this season.

“I think our coaches this year will push us really hard at practices,” Sullivan said. “They’re really going to focus on helping us get better and pushing us to do well.”

The team first started practicing March 3 and it will have its first meet April 26 at Shawnee Mission North High School.