At ADM, many students are involved in athletics. Football, baseball, basketball, you name it. However, there is one sport that often goes unnoticed. This sport is a joint sport with the Waukee schools, most practices and events for which do not even occur at ADM high school. If you haven’t already guessed, this sport is swimming. ADM and Waukee districts swim on the same team, and this season was one students last year swimming for our school. Tanner Pingel, senior at ADM, swam for the last time with his fellow swimmers before his graduation in the 2015-2016 season.

Pingel has been swimming for six years, four of which he spent on the ADM high school swim team. For years he has been spending around six days a week at swim practices, two practices a day during boys high school season. It takes great dedication to be a successful swimmer, and Pingel knows this all too well.

There are several swim strokes one can use when practicing and racing, some include butterfly, breast, freestyle and backstroke. Pingel’s favorite stroke to swim is butterfly, although he admits he races sprint freestyle. Swimming is a very individual sport, unless swimming relays, and this leaves empty time to think by yourself for instance while your face is in the water and you are staring at the bottom of a pool passing behind you.

“If you are racing someone you know, you try to beat them in friendly competition. But sometimes you get this really intense drive to swim faster and faster and faster.” said Pingel on the subject of what goes through his head while he swims. He spoke of competition but also told that sometimes his mind goes blank and he doesn’t think about much when he is racing.

Swim is extremely good exercise for the body, but swim team is also a great exercise for the mind and character builder. Pingel explained that when the high school boys season is over he spends time swimming on the club team, which is a year round swim team and opportunity for any swimmer including high schoolers, to keep swimming when they are not in season.  During summers Pingel spends two practices a day swimming for the summer team. Pingel spoke fondly of the club team.

“Club is a great way to learn to interact with different kinds of people, my club team is people from all over Iowa,” said Pingel when asked what he has learned from swimming on this team.

Swimming has been Tanners sport of choice for years, but this is not common ground between him and his friends nor his family. Pingel says that he is the only member of his family who swims although his sister, sophomore Alyssa Pingel, swam for a few years in the past. This has not slowed Pingel, he has still swam year after year since middle school.

Although swim has been such a big part of Tanner’s life and growth as an athlete and person, he admits he does not plan on swimming after he graduates. Swim is a huge time-consuming sport and with plans of being an mechanical engineering major, he explains that being on a college swim team would just not work to his advantage.

Pingel will miss the swim team when he graduates although part of him is excited for the free time he will have without all the extensive practicing. He is the only ADM senior who spent his last year in high school on the swim team.