Swimming capes

This is one of my favorite pictures from the swim team: 4 swimmers confidently striding to their relay full of Montclair Swim Team branding. You might even recognize the picture from the header of this blog.

Getting the parka is a rite of passage for swimmers; I'm pretty sure every swimmer on the team has one. And since the team swims all year round, these parkas are needed to keep warm. They are, quite possibly, as important as caps and goggles to the young competitive swimmer.

But that's not the point of the story. As part of the team's upcoming 50th Anniversary reunion picnic, we've been talking to a lot of alumni. One of the things we found out is that the parkas were called "capes" in the 80s. Capes! That is fantastic.

Of course, this might bring up another image -- Gary Hall Jr. And that isn't a bad thing. So I think the team needs to take its branding to another level. We need gigantic Montclair Swim Team foam fingers, a battle flag to fly atop the team canopy, a team bus and maybe some team shoes designed by Ryan Lochte. At the very least go back to calling them capes.