Swim coach named for new team

A veteran Columbia Falls swimming coach will lead the new joint Columbia Falls-Whitefish swim team this season.

Mike Nelson has been an assistant coach with the Wave Ryders Swim Club in Whitefish for the past three years and was the head coach of the Columbia Falls summer swim team for five years prior to that.

He was recently approved the coach of the new joint program by both the Columbia Falls and Whitefish School boards.

The new team will practice together, but will compete separately under Montana High School Association rules. Nelson said there’s about 30 athletes expected to join the teams and the coaching strategy is team unity, whether they compete separately or not.

“I want to bring Whitefish and Columbia Falls together,” he said last week.

The swimming scoreboard may tout individual accomplishments.

“(But) I always push it as a team sport,” he said.

This year’s squad will be young. There’s just four veteran swimmers, junior Karyssa Nelson, sophomore Colton Babcock, sophomore Zayne Friar and freshman Matthew Perez.

“We’ll definitely be a new team,” Nelson said.

The team will practice at The Wave in Whitefish. While it is a school-sanctioned sport, it is not school funded. The teams have had to raise all of the $20,000-plus to get the team off the ground.

The program got a big boost last week when the Plum Creek Foundation donated $6,000 to the program.

Nelson is a database administrator for Plum Creek in Columbia Falls. He grew up in Missoula and swam competitively through high school. The first practice is Nov. 20.