Five Piranha gold team members

qualify for the

championship meet.

POULSBO — Back and forth and back and forth their bodies traveled seemingly effortlessly through the chlorine-laced water.

With every repetition of the precisely timed strokes, their arms rose above the surface with graceful agility and plunged below, catapulting their bodies forward with ease.

These athletes are members of the Poulsbo Piranhas competitive gold swim team.

They practice year-round, four to five days per week for two hours each day, often swimming up to 2.8 miles or 5,000 yards, which is 200 lengths of the North Kitsap Community pool. Before changing into their swimming attire they complete a half hour of dry land calisthenics; a couple hundred pushups, core stomach and back work and running one to two miles.

“That’s just the amount of time it takes to be successful at the sport,” said Piranhas head coach Mark Van Huis during a Tuesday afternoon practice. “These guys are pretty intense athletes.”

This year the time and intensity paid off for five Piranha gold team members — Hannah Uffens, 10, Yorick Aban, 11, Ben Breakey, 12, Bethany Aban, 14, and Tom Springer, 36, — as they swam fast enough to qualify for the Pacific Northwest Championship meet, July 31-Aug. 2 in Federal Way.

The five Piranhas will compete with approximately 700 other swimmers.

Van Huis said qualifying for the meet places the five Piranhas in the top 15 to 20 percent of swimmers throughout the region. To qualify for the meet, they had to clip though the water in their prospective events faster than the previous year’s 16th fastest time, and Van Huis said every year the qualifying cutoff times improve.

Therefore, making the cut and keeping up with the curve is a tremendous accomplishment.

“To make this it’s pretty big for these guys,” Van Huis said. “It’s where most kids set their goals.”

A few weeks ago it didn’t look like any Piranhas were going to reach their goals and attend the meet, as no one had yet swam fast enough.

July 11-13 the team attended a meet in Moses Lake. It’s a fun meet for the team and a venue Van Huis said they usually don’t perform very well at, as it’s outside and the athletes don’t get to warm up or down. But this year the Piranhas were apparently hungry and swam better than ever, as 75 percent of their races were the best times of the season.

Van Huis checked the times and it was here the five qualified.

“It was like ‘Wow.’ I just kept looking through the list and there was a time and there was another time and you just get this really good uplifting feeling,” he recalled. “I can’t be more proud of what they’ve done. We came back with 75 to 80 ribbons. My car could hardly drive it was so loaded.”

Yorick, a rising Poulsbo Middle seventh-grader, will race on the 31st in the 50-meter breaststroke and butterfly and 100-meter breaststroke. To do so he had to swim the 50 fly in less than 39.69 seconds, the 50 and 100 breaststrokes in 46.49 and 1 minute, 42.69 seconds, respectively.

Yorick, who began swimming because he has asthma and it helps him breathe better, said his season goal was to qualify for the championship meet, and he’s jazzed to have met his ambition.

“It makes me feel really good and proud of myself because since I made my goal I know I can achieve what I want to, if I try hard enough,” said the young man, who’s been swimming for two years.

His next goal is to set a personal record in the 50 breaststroke by swimming it in less than 45 seconds.

Breakey, a rising eighth-grader at PMS, qualified in the 50 and 100-yard freestyle, as he swam them in less than 33.29 and 1:05.79 seconds, respectively.

He had three goals this season — to swim the 50 freestyle in less than 29 seconds (he swam it in 27.8 seconds,) to get to the championship meet and to become a better swimmer — and he met them all.

“I am very happy and proud of myself that I worked hard in practice to reach my goals,” he said, swimming goggles in hand.

Breakey’s been swimming for about three years.

Bethany, a rising ninth-grader at North Kitsap High who’s in the midst of her second year of competitive swimming, will compete in the 100-yard backstroke, as she swam it faster than 1:08.09.

She swims because she loves competing and racing and the water, which makes her feel really relaxed after she’s had a stressful day.

“Swimming has taught me to be more responsible and have a drive for whatever I do in life and always make the best of it,” she said before sharing her hope for the championship meet. “I want to make it to finals. Even though I’m pretty far out I’m going to try my hardest.”

Uffens qualified for the 100-meter fly by swimming it in less than 1:38.99 and Springer qualified for the 50-yard freestyle.