No wimps in the water

<p>Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony booms out of a speaker, rattling the summer morning quiet in Santa Rosa’s Rincon Valley. Then a series of splashes as several figures crack through the glassine surface of the water, drilling down in upside-down spins or propelling upward like leaping porpoises.</p><p>These are the Oak Park Aquastars, one of the region’s least visible and least understood competitive sporting teams.</p><p>Some 30 girls, ages 6 to 18, spend hours in this 50-meter neighborhood pool every day, engaging in a sport that demands swimming strength, gymnastic agility, precision timing, the grace of a dancer and the ability to do heavy aerobic exercise for long periods underwater without breathing and without touching the bottom of the pool.</p><p>Still think it’s a sissy pseudo-sport? Come down to the Oak Park Swim Club virtually any day of the week — even in winter, says Marion Kane Elston, a former speed swimmer who once held the women’s speed title for swimming across the Golden Gate and who founded and coached the San Francisco Merionettes synchro team for years, producing 19 national champions.</p><p>Once you see the strong shoulders and muscular thighs of her girls performing forceful figures with macho names like the barracuda twirl and canoe skull — all in near perfect timing with one another — you won’t dismiss synchronized swimming ever again, she maintains.</p><p>“These girls are athletes,” Elston declares. “If it’s messy, it’s a joke. But if it’s really good, it’s respected.”</p><p>Over the past decade the 75-year-old coach has slowly built up a small but formidable team of young swimmers, 10 of whom are traveling to Gainesville, Fla., this weekend after qualifying to compete in the elite Esynchro Age Group Nationals.</p><p>“It’s the highest level of competition. You’ve advanced out of your association and out of your zone to compete on a national level. It’s a big deal,” said Taylor Payne, spokeswoman for U.S. Synchronized Swimming Inc., a national parent organization for the sport based in Indianapolis with more than 4,000 registered swimmers.</p><p>The event draws the best 45 to 48 teams in the country — more than 1,000 junior swimmers in all — who will compete in solos, duets, trios and team events spread out over eight days. The only competitive synchro team in the North Bay, known nationally as Redwood Empire Synchro, Elston’s team is determined to place in the prestigious top 10 finals.</p><p>Slathered in tinted sunscreen, the girls have been training intensively for weeks, frequently drilling the same move over and over and over again to hone it to perfection.</p><p>To get ready for Gainesville, the girls start working out at 8 a.m. and sometimes don’t leave until 4 in the afternoon. But they’re driven by a thirst for the Olympic water sport that, like skating and gymnastics, also demands performance style, choreography and costumes in addition to athleticism.</p><p>“When you swim, you just go into your own world. Nothing can touch you,” said Mia Konjikusic, a 16-year-old junior at Analy High School in Sebastopol, explaining the lure of a sport that really didn’t come to the public’s attention until 1939, when showman Billy Rose mounted an “acquacade” at the New York World’s Fair with Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.</p><p>“The music is playing, and it’s like it’s just you and the music and there is nowhere else you can find that but here,” Konjikusic explained. “You’re so in the moment.”</p><p>Hollywood’s big pool extravaganzas with such stars as Esther Williams in the 1940s and ’50s may have made it look as effortless as dancing. But mastering the coordination, timing and muscular control is extremely difficult. And Elston says synchro can be as brutal as any contact sport. The girls can bump, collide and fall with great force.</p><p>Williams broke her neck during a climactic musical number for the film “Million Dollar Mermaid,” ruptured her eardrums multiple times and recounted in her biography how she nearly drowned shooting her oxygen-defying stunts.</p><p>“When you do lifts where you throw people out of the water, accidents can happen. We’ll throw somebody and they’ll come back down right on top of you. You’ll get hit on the head or shoulder,” said Konjikusic, who is already 6 feet 2 inches of lithe strength. “We get scratches and scars and bruises all up and down our shins.”</p><p>At national competition two years ago, two girls wound up in the hospital overnight. Another Aquastar broke her foot at a meet “land drilling,” practicing moves out of the water.</p><p>Mastering breath control while executing figures underwater for long stretches of time also can be cruelly challenging, with the sensation of drowning. Among their drills is sprint swimming the length of the pool and back underwater without surfacing.</p><p>“Sometimes you want to breathe and you can’t. You start doing the gagging reflex, wanting to get air,” said Nicole Chicoine, an incoming senior at Santa Rosa High who gave up ballet after 13 years to devote herself to synchronized swimming.</p><p>“It goes foggy, but you keep going, knowing if you can push yourself two to three more seconds, you can get air. After you’ve swum and held your breath so long and so hard you feel so accomplished having been able to do it.”</p><p>While synchronized swimming is still a niche sport, the Bay Area is a mecca that has produced a number of Olympians, said Andrea Nott, who competed in the 2006 Summer Games and now coaches with the renowned Santa Clara Aquamates.</p><p>Elston has brought her up to Santa Rosa several times, in part to inspire her girls to reach higher in the sport. After 50 years as a coach, Elston, who has owned the 50-year-old Oak Park since 1973, feels an urgency to lift other young swimmers into the sport and ready them to teach. She starts out her “Twinkles” as young as 5, knowing the earlier they begin training the higher they can reach.</p><p>Beyond the athletic challenge, the girls say they also are drawn to the sisterhood of a sport that demands such intense teamwork. They are close friends in and out of the pool. When required to stop and take extended directions, they huddle together at the edge of the pool with hugs and giggles to keep warm.</p><p>Moms contribute, helping with their waterproof makeup and designing and decorating their swimsuit costumes with sequins and other adornments. The girls all wear their hair in buns, held perfectly in place like a hard helmet with multiple packets of unflavored gelatin.</p><p>“Each girl has her strength,” said Karen Ingalls, who has two daughters in synchro, including 15-year-old Tyra, a Maria Carillo student who is headed to Gainesville.</p><p>“One may be into dance, another to music, another is good at gymnastics or they’re good lifters,” Ingalls added. “I like that they all contribute what they have and the whole seems to be greater than the sum of the parts when they come together to work toward a common goal.”</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.</p><p>com.</p>