With a successful season wrapping up, the Whitehorse Glacier Bears Swim Club looks to the future
The Whitehorse Glacier Bears Swim Club has had a fantastic season, if Head Coach Bronwyn Pasloski can say so herself. It was an exciting season, and as Pasloski explains, one full of positive change.
“The biggest change was that we had a shift in the head coach this year, to me,” she said. “I started around the end of August, early September. It was a quick transition, which was exciting for me, for sure.”
Pasloski has worked her way through the ranks, having been involved with the swim club since she was a child taking lessons herself. Having coached the Glacier Bears since 2017, she came to the role of head coach with lots of goals in mind, including to continue to foster and strengthen a sense of community in the club.
“We’ve had some awesome staff and coaches that have been with us for quite a long time,” said Pasloski. “Adding some new coaches this year created such an amazing dynamic, with our goal being to create consistency for athletes while really focusing on having more of a community in our club, this year, which I definitely saw come through.”
Pasloski’s role now involves a lot of administrative duties such as the scheduling, planning and organizing elements of the club. She doesn’t take all the credit, though, and makes sure she shouts out the team of coaches she works alongside.
“I have an amazing team of coaches which I support and mentor,” she said. “We work together bringing our team to different events within Whitehorse and, of course, throughout Canada, with a goal of having our athletes develop their skills and capacity as swimmers, and for older swimmers to excel and to see how their career can take them, such as opening up doors and opportunities for varsity swimming, as well as making events like Team Canada.”
The Whitehorse Glacier Bears Swim Club is currently in the midst of wrapping up its season, with some swimmers travelling to Toronto in early August to cap off the season in a national-level competition. Typically, the new season would start in September to align with the school year, giving the athletes a month off, but with the Canada Games Centre closing down its swimming facilities for some retiling this fall, the start of the next season has been pushed back until October.
“I’m in the thick of planning, and I’m really busy right now,” said Pasloski. “We’re trying to really come together as a community, with all of our members, so that our board members, our coaches, our athletes, our parents and guardians, etc., anyone who we consider [to be] a member of our club, can really voice what our Glacier Bears mean to us, like what is our purpose, what do we stand for with our vision and what is going to be in our future.”
For many reasons, Pasloski encourages anyone who might be interested in swimming, to give it a shot.
“What I stand behind is that swimming helps establish some key components and tools to help young children and athletes and people, in general, be successful as they navigate through their life, be [it] at school [or] in their career and their relationships when they’re older,” she said. “It creates so many healthy habits and to be able to find ways to be kind to yourself, which I’ve noticed many competitive athletes have a hard time achieving.”
