The Faircrest Cyclones’ mission is to offer children the opportunity to develop and enhance their swimming abilities, to teach the importance of teamwork and sportsmanship, and to foster social interactions and friendships in our community.

Our goals are simple:

• To become the best swimmers we can
• To build team spirit
• To develop good sportsmanship
• To make new friends
• To have fun!!!

Our vision is to strengthen our community and enrich lives through a healthy and active lifestyle.

The Faircrest Cyclones are a neighborhood summer swim team. Fundamentally, we are organized to train young swimmers ages 5 to 18 to compete against similar teams from other neighborhoods. Simple words, but let’s look at them.

• “Swimmers”: to be team-eligible, a swimmer must be able to swim one pool length (25m) unassisted. Any swimmer who is “close but not quite” we can probably get there after a week or two of practice. No tryouts, just an assessment at that time.
• “Young”: this is a team for youth. The focus is thus learning, growth, development, and fun.
• “Train”: practice makes perfect, the saying goes. Better, at least; perfection is hard. But it’s a virtual certainty that every swimmer will get stronger, faster and safer in the course of the season. We do that by hiring coaches who know how to teach, how to coach, and how to keep practice fun. We hold the coaches to high standards, but we let them coach.
• “Compete”: some swimmers and some parents may fear losing. We feel that winning and losing both teach lessons, among the most critical being the importance of sportsmanship and constant striving for success. Our meets are friendly and structured so swimmers face others of the same gender, age and approximate ability. Swimmers find that they are competing against themselves, every day, more than competing against the swimmer in the next lane, at meets: they want to “drop time” and set new “personal bests.” Laudable goals, we feel, in life as in swimming.
• “Team”: swimming is indeed an individual sport, but we emphasize team and commitment to it. We cheer for each other—loudest for the relays—and we work together, combining those individual efforts and identities into a far greater whole.
• “Neighborhood”: team spirit and neighborhood pride are two sides of the same coin, as are teambuilding and community. We unite individual efforts of self-improvement toward a team goal, and unite diverse neighbors towards improving our community. And we do this always with an eye toward the whole community: those who are not on the team but share the pool with us, those in Faircrest who don’t swim, and even those broader communities of town, city, state, nation, world. Great results come from common interest, mutual respect, and shared commitment.
• “Organized”: the Cyclones are managed as a sub-committee of the neighborhood HOA, but we are self-funded and self-operated. Members pay dues, but coaches are the only paid staff: every other bit of running the team comes from volunteerism. And every member family is expected to volunteer. The fellow team parents you elect to the committee will do their best to be open and responsive to you, to keep your dues low, and to make effective use of both your money and your effort.
• “Summer”: we hold fundraising, teambuilding and community “social” events all year, but we do swim primarily outdoors, in the summer. It seems obvious, but expect sun, heat, humidity, rain, and all those entail. Less obvious, probably, is that summer swim is just plain fun. Even the hardcore dedicated year-round swimmers—like Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky— love their summer teams, precisely because of the emphasis on team, neighborhood and fun.