There will not be much of an off-season for a small segment of the Sudbury Laurentian Swim Club swimmers and, for the most part, head coach Dean Henze is quite fine with that.
The reasons for the slightly extended swim season do vary, ranging from a sizeable bump in the number of SLSC representatives who have made their way to the Ontario Swimming Championships (July 9th to 13th at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre), with many of those same teenagers jumping right back in the water, albeit outdoors, on July 26th for the Ontario Open Water Championships at Gull Lake in Gravenhurst.
Throw in the Short Course National Championships (August 7th – 10th in Sherbrooke) that senior standout Alexandre Landry must attend to qualify for World Cup eligibility in October and one can sense very little down time for a man who is thrilled to see his provincial delegation nearly doubled from this time last year.
“There is an overall general competitiveness to these kids,” said Henze. “These kids are not just happy swimming anymore. They legitimately want to be players at the provincial level or higher – and that’s trickling down even to the 12 and unders.”
“They want to be really good – and that’s kind of fun to watch.”
Understandably, it also has a sense of appeal to others who share those dreams, including long-time North Bay swimmer Owen Baas, who made the move to Sudbury for the swim season, billeting with a local family as he completed his grade 11 year at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School.
“It was a chance to be with a more competitive team, with more people to train with, faster people to train with – and going to higher level competitions,” said Baas, one of the 11 SLSC athletes who are will compete at TPASC (vs six last year – and 2-3 in the years before that).
“I’ve improved the pull on my breaststroke a lot,” added the talented I.M. racer who was born in Sudbury but who followed the family moves to Ottawa and North Bay before returning “home”, so to speak. “I already had a strong kick. I just wasn’t putting my stroke together perfectly.”
“This year, I learned a lot about that stroke from Dean – and I am better at splitting my races. Last year, I would tend to go out really fast and die off and this year, I’ve developed a really good back half to my race.”
Though the goals for the upcoming provincials are to continue to nibble away at faster and faster clockings, the lure of the Open Water Championships is altogether different – certainly in the mind of the young man completing his first year with SLSC.
“This will be my first open water meet,” Baas acknowledged. “It will help to maintain my fitness throughout the summer. In the past, I basically stopped swimming after provincials and got back into it in September.”
“This will be beneficial going into next year.”
When searching for ideas on long-term development in the pool, Baas and his teammates need not look a whole lot further than in the direction of Alexandre Landry. The 22 year-old who has just completed his fourth year (of five) while pursuing a General Business degree at L.U. evolved through much of his youth as a member of the Valley East Waves and head coach Sharon Leger.
It was only in his mid-teens that he would connect with SLSC, immersing himself in a setting that was fortunate enough to offer a number of training partners who were more than capable of pushing the pace with Landry. In many ways, the graduate of Ecole secondaire Hanmer has come full circle now as he cherishes his relationship with the up and comers at SLSC.
“With the team here, I feel like an older brother,” he laughed. “Everybody is looking up to me which helps keep me young and pushes me to be even better, being a role model for them. It’s a lot of fun having that aspect.”
Landry has just returned from the 2025 Bell Canadian Swimming Trials in Victoria (B.C.), one of only two swimmers from northern Ontario (Annabelle Jackson from North Bay was the other) who competed with the best of the best in the country. While he did not quite hit the times he would have liked, Landry still topped out at 14th on a national level, qualifying for the “B” final in each of his three races (50m/100m/200m breaststroke).
Supplementing the motivation that he receives on a daily basis from his Sudbury teammates are the training sessions he squeezes in, a few times a year, with the High Performance Centre in Scarborough.
“That brought me a new challenge and some new energy swimming with people that are older or the same age as me,” he said.
It also tends to accentuate the specific address he needs to address – mostly starts and turns - in order to go toe to toe with those who might still get the better of the local talent in race settings.
“That’s really the biggest challenge for me compared to my competitors,” stated Landry. “Starts are difficult to train in Sudbury. We don’t have the starting blocks with the wedge.”
Returning to Laurentian for one final year of studies, Landry plans to attend Teachers College in Ottawa, swimming for the Gee Gees for the 2026-2027 OUA season.
For as much as coach Henze would love to see a return to the pre-Covid training environment that would see his troops and Voyageurs varsity swimmers enjoying all that the Olympic Gold Pool had to offer on campus, he remains happy with the re-embracing of a mindset that followed the “just happy to be back in the water” sentiment of early 2022.
“There was an 18 month stretch of “learning how to swim fast again”,” said Henze. “There was a hole. We had a culture at the university. Kids would come in and watch Nina (Kucheran) and Thomas Boyd and others.”
“And being in two different venues doesn’t help.”
Still, progress is progress – even when there is more than can be done.
