Head Coach McGee Moody Previews Upcoming Georgia Dual

– [Interviewer] All right, we’re here with head coach McGee Moody. Coach, you guys are back in the pool this Saturday, traveling to Georgia. It will be your first meet since the dual with Georgia actually back in October, October 23rd. Just how excited are you to get back in the pool?

– It’d be good to get back and race again. This year has been obviously for every sport, completely different. And you know, what we thought was going to be our schedule this year, back in August, got reworked and we made a decision that we wanted to minimize our exposure to other teams as much as possible. So, what we decided to do was do a home in a way with Georgia, a home and away with UNC, set up a three-day invite and then work into our championship season. And so, while it’s a great plan even we still had to cancel a few of those meets. And so, this will be our first meet since we swam UGA back in the fall and it’s going to be good to get a chance to race again see where we are, see how our athletes are responding to our our training over break. And since we’ve been back, it’d be our first road meet. And so for our freshmen, they’ve never traveled with us before. And so, this is all going to be new. So, there’s a lot of things we’ve got to learn and really we’ve had to expect a whole lot from our athletes this year. They’ve had to embrace the every moment that we have ’cause honestly, you know, we know this we don’t know, this could be our last meeting of the year so we’ve got to be great. And so, that’s when we talk about every time is making the most of every opportunity that we’ve got and we’ve got another one this Saturday and Georgia is one of the best teams in the country. They have a tradition, the swimming tradition that is is maybe second to none. So, we’re going to go down there, we’re going to race and we’re going to see where we are and then we’re going to do our best to put a win on the board.

– [Interviewer] You just touched on it a little bit the adversity this year, obviously it’s been challenging for everyone living in this COVID-19 world. Just talk about you and the staff maybe the plan you guys have put together and the different plans you guys have had to come up with all the different challenges and changes.

– Oh, I don’t know if we have enough time to talk about all of them. But I think really it started right off the bat when we had to change the way one, we communicated with our team, the way we recruited or we communicated with our parents. We had to change our whole practice system. Everything that we knew to be normal, had to be reimagined and redesigned in order to fit CDC protocols, our university protocols, athletic department protocols. The testing that we have to put in each week, the amount of time that has to come before competitions and things like that. Everything that we knew to be normal had to change. And so, really our coaches started as early as last March and April thinking about how this was going to work. And, you know, we kind of have a running joke that for every question that you answer, 25 more questions come out of that one answer. And it’s still the same. I mean, right now we’re five weeks out of our SCC championships and there’s still a a hundred questions that have to be answered about how we’re going to operate in that setting and what we’re going to do and how that meet is actually going to go off. And so, I think one of the things about coaches that specialize, we’re strategists, we look at the problem and we work the problem. We figure out how to get through that issue. And we’re doing the same thing here daily. You know, it’s when we have a COVID test and we have, say if somebody comes back positive, we have to immediately start thinking about who are the close contacts, how does that affect practices, were any coaches involved? All these different things go through on a daily basis. And I think our staff and our administration has done an outstanding job this year, keeping those things to a minimum and helping us work through. I mean, this is something that if you’d asked me 20 years ago if I ever thought I’d have to see something like this in coaching, absolutely not. Like this is so far beyond anything we’ve ever had to work through. I was joking the other day with Marisa, what I used to consider big problems are nothing now. Like we just glaze right past them. And we had a call a couple of days ago, and we didn’t know if we were going to be able to get our suits in time for championships and we just kind of rolled on past it and dealt with, you know, deal with the next problem that comes up because you know, it’s taught us to take that adversity as it comes and work your way through the problem and move on to the next thing. And so, I think as rough as this year has been, there’s going to be a lot of good come out of it

– [Interviewer] Back to the pool now. If there’s a couple females swimmers that you could maybe point to that you’re excited to see compete this weekend and who are some of those?

– You know, I think I want to see, well before I point to one or two, I want to see our freshmen again. This is the biggest and the hardest part of our season is trying to figure out how the new folks that we’ve never trained through an entire year before responding. So, I’m excited to see our freshmen race. I want to see Taylor Steele. Taylor Steele is one of our top returning athletes and she was last year set to go to NCAAs, didn’t get the opportunity to because it was canceled and this year coming back, I think she’s positioned herself to go and be ready to do that again. I’m ready to see some of our upper class. I want to see them in a leadership role. I want to see how they can help this team continue to move forward from a leadership aspect. We know, we kind of know where they are athletically but I think from that leadership position they haven’t had that many opportunities this year. At least in a competition setting. So, I’m looking forward to that as well.

– [Interviewer] A couple of people on the male side that you may be looking forward to see compete this weekend.

– You know, Rafa Devi is back this year and he actually took an Olympic red shirt to prepare for 2020 last year and obviously 2020 didn’t happen. So, he’s back in school. Now we’re still preparing for the Olympics this summer but Rafa gets a chance to come back and he gets a chance to kind of reestablish himself as one of the top distance swimmers, not only in the SCC, but also in the country. He’s done a great job for us. I’m excited to see Mash Birkin and Guy Cropper and HJ Ross race again. These guys are our leaders. They lead a sprint squad that has become a heart and soul of our program, which is almost a complete 180 from where we were probably five years ago. We were known to be a distance-based program. The coaching staff made a decision that we were going to highly invest in our sprinters and bring them and bring those relays along. These guys had been at the forefront of that. So, really excited to see them race, see where they are. And, like I said, this next week specifically is setting up our SCC championships and what we can expect to see because after we swim UNC, I think on the 24th now, after that meet we’re in a bubble. We lock down until we leave to go to SCC championships. So, we’ve got to take advantage of these next three meets and do the best we can with them.

– [Interviewer] Overall team expectations going into this weekend. What do you want to see overall maybe from both groups on Saturday, down in Athens?

– I want to see confidence. I think if there’s one thing, especially with our younger people, when they go into these meets against teams like Georgia, teams like Florida, when we race Michigan, Texas some of the top teams in the country, you want to see these young people really exude confidence. You want to see them go in and race with purpose. You want to see them believe in themselves. So, from a team expectation, I want to go down there and I want to race. I want to race hard. We’re, it’s a very difficult position that because of this COVID year, we’re putting ourselves in. We’re literally, our women are leaving at 5:30, on Saturday morning to go down and race at 10:00 AM in Athens. Normally we would go down the day before, we would prep for it, we’d have a morning swim the next morning. So, because of the situation that we’re in, we’re basically, we’re putting this out there and we’re saying, “Hey, look, yeah, it’s not optimal but we’re going to make the best of it. And we’re going to go down and do this. So, I want to see them embrace this adversity. I want to see them be confident in their ability. If we can do that, we’ll set ourselves up for a great taper and we’ll set ourselves up for a great SCC.

– [Interviewer] I appreciate the time coach, best of luck this weekend and safe travels.

– Thank you guys, I appreciate it.