“You have to get your pumpkin on the way,” Wrangell’s swim coach, Jamie Roberts, said to about a dozen high school swimmers lined up at the edge of the Parks and Rec Center pool. “I hope these things float.”
It’s hot in the large, enclosed room and she’s dressed for that with a tank top and shorts on. Me, on the other hand? I’m overdressed.
It’s Halloween, which is why she brought pumpkins for a game. And yes, they do float. The high school students are practicing with them to have some extra fun before their regional meet.
The game involves throwing their pumpkins in the pool lane and the swimmers dive in after them, swim a lap with them and their swim partner takes over and repeats.
“I’m gonna say take your mark, and when I say hut, that’s when you throw,” Roberts said. “Okay, if you break your pumpkin you gotta stay after and clean the pool.”
The swimmers immediately threw their pumpkins in their lanes and dove in after she said hut. Soon after, the sound of their swim kicks dominated the pool area.
Roberts is in her seventh season coaching the high school swim team and her ninth year with the swim club, but that’s all changed since a couple weeks ago when she moved to the Lower 48 in late November, leaving behind shared memories from the pool. She started out as a volunteer with the club and then transitioned to coach. The club is for ages four to 18.
“It offers different events at swim meets,” she said. “The club tends to be a more intensive, competitive program. I mean, high school swimming, obviously, is competitive, but I kind of call it the fun years in terms of coaching and competing.”
She said high school swim is more relaxed from a coaching standpoint. They feel different to her but she loves them both.
Fast forward almost a decade later and she’s leaving her island community, including her beloved swimmers. She said the thought of leaving them probably won’t really hit her until after she makes the move.
Early years
It wasn’t until she was an adult when she seriously started swimming. She learned competitive swimming here in Wrangell and her coaching experience exploded from that time.
“Swim Club probably had to be the very first competitive meet that I went to,” Roberts said. “I was not a swimmer growing up, I had a small pool in my backyard that I played in for fun, but I played three other sports, and so swimming was not one of them.”
She said her first swim meet was in Petersburg. She and other parents were kind of at a loss because they and the swimmers had never gone to a meet before.
“The learning curve was steep,” Roberts said. “It was just kind of hilarious because the kids are looking to us for instruction. We’re like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s find out.’ But, you know, the parents and the staff of the other teams were super supportive.”
She said she still felt like she had no idea what she was doing, but the support helped.
“It was loud, it was noisy, it was hot, It was overwhelming,” Roberts said. “Must not have been too bad because I turned around and attended another one just a few months later.”
And she said the support still hasn’t stopped…it’s still going.
“…no two body shapes are the same.”
She said between the swim club and the high school swim team, she’s brought her swimmers to roughly 87 meets.
Roberts said the swim team has a very high retention rate from year to year.
“I have kids in my program that started swimming when I first started, when they were eight,” she said. “Now they’ve graduated, and they’ve gone through the high school program.”
She said a valuable lesson she’s learned as a coach is that there’s no one right way to teach swimming.
“You’re suspended horizontally in a liquid, and no two body shapes are the same,” Roberts said. “I really had to learn that there’s just really not one way to teach kids and to help kids learn how to swim. A lot of them, they ride in the water different. Some kids are floaters, some are sinkers.”
“For a while we were battling with the leak…in the pool”
And there have been challenges, like when COVID hit and the pool was shut down for two years. There were other disruptions in pool usage too.
“For a while we were battling with the leak that was happening in the pool, and we had to shut down,” Roberts said. “Anytime we shut down, there’s no alternative. I’m not an open water swimmer, but I know they’ve done swim lesson programs or swimming out in the ocean [before].”
She said they lost momentum during those times but bounced right back.
Coaching the very young is key, but there wasn’t enough time
Roberts said another challenge is not being able to coach the very young because she only gets a couple hours of pool time a day with everyone.
She said she has coached as young as four years old, but wishes there was more room to sustain that, since she also coaches all the way up to 18 year old.
“A lot of them have not established a sense of fear of the water yet, and that’s a great time to work with them,” Robert said. “Frankly, we live on an island, and it’s a life saving skill.”
Roberts said she doesn’t focus on awards and winning at all when coaching, but instead she emphasizes progress.
“I’ve had high school swimmers go to state like five out of the last six years,” she said. “There was one year we didn’t have state because of COVID. So [essentially] I’ve had kids go to state every year. I’ve had kids go to Junior Olympics every year.”
Thoughts from her swimmers
Back at the pool during a break, high schooler Johanna Sanford said she’s been swimming with Jamie for two years.
“Jamie is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met,” she said. “Like genuinely, she’s so kind and just patient, and I’ve never felt as accepted and just as loved by someone who wasn’t like my family before.”
She said the whole team is torn up that she’s leaving, but she’s happy for Roberts’ new move. Sanford said that although she’s only been swimming with her for a couple years, she’s known her her whole life.
“I remember her when I was tiny coming to the pool,” she said. “She’s always been friends with my mom and I think she’s known my mom for really long time. I’ve always loved Jamie, like, even when I was little, I remember her just being kind of a safe space.”
Tenth grader Andrei Bardin-Siekawitch said he’s also been on the high school swim team for two years, but has been in the club for seven years before that. He said Roberts was always there, either as an assistant coach or, like now, running the whole thing.
“It is really sad to see her go,” he said. “I’m hoping it’s a good thing for them though. A lot of interesting feelings since I guess we kind of took her for granted. She was always here, always helping us out, always going on trips with us. You know, never really thought about it until now.”
He said she’s always kept them engaged and always included games and activities in the trainings, like the Halloween theme with the pumpkins.
“She is leaving because of the landslide.”
Senior Annika Herman agrees that it’s really sad. She’s been swimming on the team for about two years.
“She is leaving because of the landslide,” she said. “That was a very terrible, terrible day, if anything. We lost a classmate of ours, and now Jamie is leaving us. So in my opinion, when she told us, it kind of just made me really sad.”
She said that Roberts chose her to be the captain this year. So she’s worked closely with her and she’s grateful for that.
“Everyone has to move on and do their own thing,” Herman said.
Roberts was having some anxiety about leaving because she didn’t know who was going to take over.
“I thought, when I leave in November, that’s just going to be it in terms of the program,” she said. “But since then, I have had somebody step up that’s interested in coaching the high school team and then also trying to take on the club. It’s a lot, so they’re just gonna have to feel it out.”
Roberts said she’s been a one-person show for swim, meaning she’s done all the administrative work, coaching and planning trips.
A little bit of rest first, then swim
Going forward, Roberts said she’s going to get some rest first, in her new home near Eugene, Oregon, before getting back into swimming.
“Right now, I just feel a little bit worn down, but I think it’s just a combination of this whole last year,” Roberts said. “I know that after I take a little bit of time off, that I’m going to probably be itching to find a way to get connected [with community].”
And although she’s coached for about a decade, she said she participated in her very first swim meet this past April.
“That was a big moment for me,” Roberts said. “I participated in a race along with kids from my team, because there’s a meet every year in the spring, Southeast Championship, where they open it up to registered masters, U.S. Masters swimmers, and maybe like four or five might participate.”
Roberts said she wants to continue swimming as an adult. She said it was a requirement that wherever they moved, it had to be where an aquatic facility existed.
