Seals and Snowfox swim teams merge

Seals Swim Team and Snowfox Swim Team, Sioux Falls' two swim clubs, have merged to form Sioux Falls Swim Team, the organization announced Tuesday.

The team said in a release that the decision to came after "research, planning and discussions" and was approved by an "overwhelming majority vote."

Barry Hein, the former president of Snowfox who is now the vice president of Sioux Falls Swim Team, with former Seals president Jason Ahrendt reprising that role with the new club, said discussions on merging the two teams began last fall, about a year after funding for the new Midco Aquatic Center at Spellerberg Park was approved. Construction for the building began in March 2015.

Hein mentioned exposing swimmers to more new faces and fostering friendships and increasing efficiency in the clubs' operations as reasons for the merger.

"A lot of structure and organizational components will hopefully (be combined)," Hein said.

The new nine-member board for the Sioux Falls Swim Team, has already been approved, featuring five former Snowfox board members and four from Seals, and the two clubs' web addresses, snowfoxswim.com and fastseals.com, now direct to a single website for the new club.

Clyde Smith, the former head coach of Snowfox, is still listed at the new team's head coach on the website, but Hein said a national search for a new coach is taking place, with Smith as one of the candidates.

Hein said the merger allows the team to streamline operations with the website, the board, relations with USA Swimming and volunteering and fundraising operations. The new team will simply combine the numbers from the two previous bodies, resulting in a new count of 235 swimmers, according to the numbers provided in the release.

"When we put on a swim meet, whether we have 50 kids swimming or 500 kids swimming, it's really the same number of workers that are needed," Hein said. "And so we'll have a bigger pool, literally, to draw from."

The merger also allows for more efficient use of the Midco Aquatic Center, which is scheduled to open this fall. The two teams used a number of facilities around the city, like the downtown EmBe Fitness and Aquatic Center, Trail Ridge Retirement Community, Dow Rummel Village and the Elmen Center. The Sioux Falls Swim team plans to still need multiple facilities, but it hopes that the Midco Aquatic Center can be a more consistent home for the program.

The construction of the new facility comes at an opportune time, as Hein said the clubs typically would experience a significant membership bump in Olympic years, like 2016. Conflicts could potentially arise with the teams at Augustana and USF, both of which begin with competition, and while the latter plans to stick to the Elmen Center for practices and dual meets, according to Vikings head coach Lindsie Micko, the Cougars plan to make the Midco Aquatic Center their full-time home. Heather Hitterdal, a communications specialist with the city, said usage agreements for the new facility have yet to be finalized.

Hein said the creation of the two college programs didn't play a direct role in the merger, though.

"We hope to be able to send kids to those schools, just like I would expect that those schools would love to have some vast homegrown talent attending," he said. "And we expect that we're going to continue good relations that we've enjoyed with both of the teams thus far."