Into the swim of things

Mike Sciacca

It was just two years ago that Tori Smith was a beginning swimmer and

her brother, Joshua, couldn’t swim the width of a pool.

Today, the Huntington Beach siblings are forces to be reckoned with in

the water.

Tori and Joshua are members of the Green Valley Swim Team of Fountain

Valley. At the Southern California Swimming Championships held earlier

this month at El Toro High, the duo came up with six individual and one

team first place finish between them.

Tori, who will enter the third grade next week at Grace Lutheran

Elementary School in Huntington Beach, captured first place in the

25-yard freestyle, 25-yard butterfly and won the 50-yard freestyle by two

body lengths in the girls’ 7-8 division. The 8-year-old also swam the

butterfly leg on Green Valley’s winning medley relay team.

She was the individual high point winner at the 7-8 girls’

championships.

In addition, she never lost a single race in either the 25- or 50-yard

freestyle event during the season.

“Awesome,” was how she described her feelings of performing so well.

Her 6-year-old brother matched her feats.

Joshua said it was “pretty neat” to win the 25-yard freestyle, 25-yard

butterfly and the 25-yard breaststroke at the SCSC meet as well as being

the high point winner in the boys’ 5-6 division at the championships.

Again like his sister, Joshua never lost a single race in the 25-yard

free, 25-yard breaststroke, 25-yard butterfly and the 25-yard backstroke

during the swim season.

The Southern California Swim Conference features seven teams from

Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Newport Beach and Lake Forest.

Tori and Joshua also were named most outstanding swimmer in their

respective divisions by a 260-member strong Green Valley Swim Team

program.

“They both have the talent but to develop into really successful

swimmers, [but] takes a lot of time and hard, hard work,” said GVST Coach

Vladimir Saposhkov, a former Russian junior national champion and coach

of recent Olympic athletes. “It would take 10 years minimum in the water

to gain the skills needed to succeed in swimming. If Tori and Josh want

to pursue swimming and they work really hard over the next few years then

I think they can become very good at it.”

Saposhkov has coached the GVST program for the past five years and

says that both Smiths pay attention to their stroke and have good

technique -- “and not bad results, either.”

You’ve heard of home schooling? Well, this is a case of home pooling.

Once the Smith siblings got involved in swimming they worked on their

stroke technique in their home pool. They had some knowledgeable help

there too -- in their parents. Brad Smith swam at UC Santa Barbara and

their mother, Robin, swam in a masters league.

“Joshua literally couldn’t swim the width of the pool when he started

swimming two years ago and Tori was just a beginner,” Brad Smith said.

“In addition to their competing with Green Valley, Robin and I spend time

with the kids in our pool, helping them work on their strokes. Coach

Vladi (Saposhkov) has been great and the kids have come to love the

water.”

In his first year, when he won the program’s most dedicated swimmer

award, Joshua was the lone 4-year-old in the entire league to win a gold

medal by swimming the freestyle leg on Green Valley’s winning medley

relay team.

In Tori’s first year with the program, she was third in the 25-yard

butterfly and 25-yard freestyle, and was on Green Valley medley relay

teams that won both first and second place.

“They both have gotten off to a very good start,” Saposhkov said. “A

lot of attention is paid to kids starting at 5 or 6 years old and in my

opinion, kids need to be taught things at a very early age.”

Tori says she “taught my younger brother how to do the breaststroke

kick.”