Elkins Otters

1. Are team suits/team gear required?

No, suits and gear are not required.  However, many swimmers like to purchase the team suits, and the link is on the home page of our website.

2. Who chooses team gear?

The board of directors chooses team suits, logos, and colors for team gear.  Every reasonable effort is made to keep costs as low as possible.  COVID has made the supply chain very hard to predict, so many of our choices had to be made based on what colors/styles were available for youth and adult products.

1. Do I need to volunteer?

Yes, we need parent volunteers.  To make a home meet run smoothly, we need roughly 20 volunteers!  Away meets are the responsibility of the other team, so we typically only need around 2 volunteers.

2. How do I sign up to volunteer?

There will be a volunteer sign up available for each meet on our team website.  If we do not have enough, we will have to ask for more.

3. Why do I need to ask for business sponsors?

We know you are busy, and during the summer, we do not want to ask swimmers to participate in even more fundraisers.  However, our generous sponsors help us to keep our costs for families low, so we depend on them each year.  We have to pay money to rent the pool, pay coaches, and pay lifeguards each summer, and our participation fees do not cover these costs.

4. Do I need to download the swimtopia app?

We recommend that you download the app and enable push notifications.  This will be our primary way of communicating changes to the schedule, meet information, etc.   If you do not download the app, please check your email and make sure you add swimtopia to your contacts so that the email will not go to your junk folder.  The app is free unless you purchase the 'Pro plan' which we do NOT recommend at this time.

5. If I have problems or concerns (coaching issues, swimmer issues, etc), what should I do?

If you need assistance or to voice concerns, we ask that you get into the habit of emailing the team at [email protected].  We ask that you do NOT ask for the coaches' personal phones numbers and that you do not contact them with your problems on their personal time.