Huntington Beach swimming: Camped with the right coach
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. — Now in his ninth season heading Huntington Beach High School’s (HBHS) Men’s Swim Team, Coach Ryan Camps is a 2008 HBHS alumnus who, since the age of 5, also grew up training in Surf City.
“It is my greatest sense of pride to be able to build a Division I program at my alma mater,” Coach Camps said.
To accomplish that, Coach Camps says that he promotes the core values of “being a family” and “teamwork.”
“Many have misconceptions about swimming being an individual sport. [But] in order to win high school meets, you need to have a solid 15 to 20 swimmers for your varsity program,” Coach Camps said. “Often, the teams with the fastest one or two swimmers end up losing meets.”
To develop those competitive performers, Coach Camps focuses on both mental and physical training. However, he’s careful to differentiate that approach based on age and maturity.
“We sit down at the start of the year and go over both educational and athletic goals for each swimmer,” Coach Camps said. “I break the training down to focus on individual goals for each day, week, month, and season. I split our training into four, three-week chunks to focus on our aerobic base.”
It’s taken nearly a decade, but Camps says that the Oiler swim program has finally been rebuilt.
“We were 10-0 last season and won our first league title since 1938,” Coach Camps said. “Part of that lengthy time between league titles is because we did not have our team community built up… HBHS needs to be the program where athletes from our area want to go to compete.”
Ironically, the pandemic can be credited for contributing to that success.
“We practiced year round with near-perfect attendance as there was not much else for the student athletes to do — and we saw great drops in our swimmers’ times,” Coach Camps said. “Instead of lamenting about the issues of the pandemic, we focused on being the best we can be.”
Camps’ goal for the team this season is to become Sunset League champions for the third time in school history. Who might be leading the way? He advises keeping an eye on senior/team captain Nick Olquin, junior/team captain Hudson Ruth, junior Jayden Leiva, and sophomore Finneas Tas Palcza.
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