Hello Blue Fins Families and welcome to our 2021-22 swim season.

My name is Kevin Rizzardi and I am your parent liaison. It is my job to help navigate you through the season by being a resource for questions that might come up. You can of course always reach out to our coaches, but I am here to help as well. The best way to reach me is by email at [email protected]. I will also be assisting with a number of other responsibilities until I am able to identify some volunteers (more to come on that).

I know that this email is long and I promise you it will be the longest one I send for the season. I wanted to cover everything in one email to cut down on your inbox.

Mailboxes - On Monday evening I will be placing a couple of folder bins on the tables in the viewing area at the Y. In these bins will be a folder for every family and in these folders is where we will place various items such as beads, ribbons, and any other things that need to get handed out to you and your swimmer.

Dog Tag Design Contest - This has become an annual tradition for us and we will be continuing it this season. Each swimmer will receive a dog tag and then they will have the opportunity to earn beads throughout the season by achieving certain milestones. For now though I am just asking you to print off the attachment included in this email and offer your swimmer the opportunity to enter their design. This is optional, but we hope to get lots of entries. All entries will be due by Monday, October 25 as noted on the form.

You will hear the coaches say that it takes an army to run a swim meet and with that it takes some officers to lead that army. So I am looking for a few volunteers to assist this season in key roles. Some of these roles do count towards your work bond for the season so you would not need to volunteer for anything else. If that is the case I have listed them below as EXEMPT. Here are the roles that we currently need filled:

• Volunteer Coordinator - EXEMPT - This individual will be responsible for coordinating volunteers for the swim meets throughout the season. They will track volunteer status and communicate throughout the season to ensure that parents know if they have fulfilled their work bond requirement.
• Social Coordinator - EXEMPT - This individual will help to organize and plan for team socials (Team Spirit dinner, Christmas party, End of season party, etc.)
• Lead Marshaller - EXEMPT - (2 roles) - These two individuals will be responsible for organizing the marshalls at every meet to ensure that our younger swimmers are getting where they need to be during the event. - I believe we have these two positions already filled with volunteers from a prior season.
• Hospitality Coordinator - EXEMPT - This individual will coordinate the food and drink items that we sell during our home dual meets. They will send out requests for donations and organize the actual snack table during the meet. They will also solicit volunteers to work the snack table.
• Award Committee/Bead Coordinators - EXEMPT - (2 roles) - These individuals will coordinate the awarding of the beads and getting them distributed to the swimmers who earn them. This is a bigger role than it may seem as it requires tracking swimmer events and times to determine which swimmers should be awarded beads. They will also support in getting ribbons distributed as they are earned. We already have one parent who has volunteered for this role, but we would like to have a second to support.

Some other roles that we will need support with outside of typical meet support.  No need to sign up for these quite yet, but if you are willing to help you can just send me an email.

• Apparel Committee - Although I will handle most of the logistics such as getting apparel to the Y I will ask for support in distributing these items during times when I cannot be on site.
• Social Committee - The social coordinator will need support in organizing any social events that we have.

There are also a number of job that we will need volunteers for during the actual meets. Rather than list them here I encourage you to read the Swim Parents Survival Guide that is on our team site https://neys.swimtopia.com/swim-meet-101. This guide will not only answer some of the questions you might have, it will also provide brief descriptions of each volunteer role that is needed during a meet.

Anyone who is or will be a trained official or meet manager operator please send me an email with the details of your role. I do have a list of past season officials, but rather than sending that out I thought it best to solicit your response. Once I have a list of officials I will send just that group an email to start compiling our roster for each of the scheduled meets.

Coach sends out emails that answer a lot of the questions you might have. He usually adds them as a news post to our team site so in the event you want to refer back to something you might find it easier to just reference the home page under the "News" section.

Finally, just a reminder that George from A&H will be on site at the Y on Monday, October 18th for the swimsuit try on. I just met with George this afternoon and confirmed that nothing has changed from our 2019-2020 suit design just to give you an idea. Please refer to Coach Drakes email from 10/1 if you for additional details on this.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly. Here’s to another great Blue Fins swim season!

Thank you,

Kevin