Spending 25 hours per week staring at the black line on the bottom of a pool doesn’t sound appealing to most people, but that’s typical for the boys swim team.

Senior Adam Houghton has been swimming since he was little, so he said he’s used to it.

“I started swimming when I was 8 years old,” he said. “It’ll be 10 years in April.”

Houghton said his favorite part of swimming is the people because they are together so often and form strong bonds.

“I love everyone that I spend countless hours with swimming,” he said. “The teammates and the friends you meet make it more like a big family than just a team.”

What makes swimming different than most sports is it’s not just a team sport, Houghton said.

“It’s an individual sport most of the time, but you’re also working toward a team goal,” he said. “You’re working to do everything you can for the team while also doing the best you can individually.”

Junior Tilston Harrelson said his focus is on getting faster personally rather than beating the person next to him.

“In the past, I’d done a lot of team sports,” he said. “But for swim you’re racing against the clock.”

There aren’t many boys on the swim team this year, but seven of them are seniors. Coach Adam Bien said having several upperclassmen is helpful.

“In the past we’ve only had, at the most, four seniors,” he said. “It’s great having a good group of guys who know how we do things on the team. We expect them to motivate and help out the younger guys, too.”

Houghton said he’s been able to get to know the other seniors well.

“We came in with a group of seniors who have all swam before,” he said. “We’ve all gone through high school together.”

Swim requires previous experience to excel, Houghton said.

“It’s something you probably would have to have done before you started high school,” he said. “It’s a lot of work. You don’t want to put that much time into it then not be very good, so it’s not really appealing to a lot of people.”

Harrelson said he joined the team with no previous swimming exposure.

“Freshman year was my first experience with swimming competitively,” he said. “I adjusted pretty well. I had played lots of sports before, but that was my first time swimming.”

Bien said the reasons the swim team is smaller than most other teams at BV are the lack of students with swimming experience and the difficulty of the sport.

“There’s just not a large pool of boy swimmers,” he said. “We have a cut number but haven’t had to use it in the past. Typically the boys figure out pretty quickly if they’ll be able to do it or not.”

Harrelson said the team encourages each other to push themselves in and out of the pool.

“We really rely on each other for motivation,” he said. “We back each other up and root for each other.”