Here's the A-B-Cs for swimmers and their tapers

It's championship season for area swimmers, and everyone's talking taper. And just like an aquatic limbo contest, the point of the discussion is always a version of "how low can you go?"

Nowhere in the world of swimming do the terms "art" and "science" more come together than when athletes start to taper. Championship season started two weeks ago with conference meets and continues Saturday with sectional meets.

Tapering is serious stuff, but although the term is a one size fits all term for a resting process that produces large time drops -- the manner in which the taper takes place is hardly a cookie cutter to be placed on a swimmer based on stroke, age or body size.

"I have something like eight different practices going on each day," St. Charles North coach Rob Rooney said. "The warm-up may be the same for everyone and the swim downs may be the same. But once they get working, there are a lot of different things going on in the water."

Swimmers "overtrain" during the season. This means they swim excessive yardage in practice to keep their muscles in a tired state. At the end of the season, tapering rests those muscles. When asked to perform again, these rested muscles, honed from a season of exertion, fire like rockets, and the swimmer reaches his fastest times of the season.

Illinois is a very fast boys swimming state, and all but the most fastest, most confident swimmers aim their tapers for the sectional meet.

"This is a qualification meet and we want to qualify our guys for the state meet," Rooney said.

There are some general rules to tapering, though none of them is an absolute. One is that swimmers who recorded a time below the state qualifying standard, called a cut, do not taper for the sectional.

The idea here is that if a swimmer already has his cuts, he can reproduce that swim again. But the taper is a variable thing. Art does mix with the science, and the goal is to have the swimmer at his fastest when he needs that time.

"I think a lot has to do with the confidence level between the athlete and the coach," Rooney said. "If the kid believes in you, you can give him anything and they'll swim fast. Other kids want to feel right every day. Athletes and coaches have to believe 100 percent in each other. When you have that type of correlation between the two, you have a pretty reliable taper."

It is often said that taller swimmers take longer to taper. But again, nothing is absolute, and some tall swimmers need to taper at different time frames than others.

"They say that the more muscle you have, the longer it takes to work the taper," Rooney said. "But what if the kid hasn't been in the water for nine months straight? What if he's only been swimming during high school season? Those are factors you have to take into account."

Distance swimmers are often the last to taper. Sprinters tend to move away from their long-yardage practices earlier in the tapering process and concentrate on precision facets of their swim such as starts, turns and finishes.

But Rooney said once again that while this is a general guideline, the exact nature of each taper needs to be considered.

"Distance kids are different from sprinters and distance kids are different from mid-distance kids," Rooney said. "But you have to find what works for that kid."

Part of the knowledge required is just simply knowing how a swimmer reacts to a taper. Rooney said a year ago that it took him two years to figure out the best way to run Chris Peterson through his taper. Peterson won a pair of state titles as a senior and three championships in his career before embarking on a college career at Minnesota.

Some tapers are legendary. St. Charles East, under Dave Bart and then under Joe Cabel, produced teams that have gone from decent to turbocharged through championship season. New Trier is another of those schools which goes consistently faster in championship season than during any other part of the year. Those historic connections cannot simply be explained away as coincidence.

"That's all a part of past experience and tradition," Rooney said. "We have eight years of tradition at North. There are other schools with 20 or 40 or more years. When you have that on your side, things tend to work well. We are dealing with our own traditions."

One of these traditions is to remove hair from one's body. Untapered swimmers tend to have really shaggy heads of hair. At some schools, such as St. Charles East, that hair gets dyed blonde before it is shaved off, along with arm hair or leg hair, which really does turn swimmers into dolphins for the final meets of championship season.

Again, there is science to this -- body hair produces drag, which is a swimmer's enemy. But a swimmer could simply wear a cap and a body-hugging suit to reduce drag. But there is also art in this, and "shaving and tapering" carries an almost mystical quality to it.

"A lot of it has to do with the feeling that you've sacrificed everything when you get up on that block," Rooney said. "Whether you're wearing a cap or not, you want to have the mentality that you are going to go fast. Just because you've shaved your head doesn't mean you're going to go fast. You have to have everything put together for it to work."

Rooney said he sees the Saints as being primed for another of these tapers this weekend. St. Charles East is one of the teams competing at St. Charles North on Saturday.

"Marmion should be heavily favored," Rooney said. "They may be a closet team that can upset some people. I don't think a lot of people have looked at them too closely. But when you do, you see that they are a stacked team.

"St. Charles East's freestylers and their two freestyle relays are going to be pretty quick. Lake Park and Wheaton each have guys who will be fast and who will push their relays to be faster. There will be five solid teams here, and we're just one of them."

The North Stars have been a building program in recent years, punctuated by last year's fifth-place finish. Successful tapering has been a key to their success. Clearly St. Charles North has worked the art and science together well, like an aquatic alchemy.

As Rooney says, "there is a lot of science to it. But science can be mental too."