Montgomery County Council will approve PVS plan!

By Reach for the Wall Staff

8/24/2020: In the county council meeting which started at 9:30am this morning, a discussion took place regarding relaxing restrictions on several youth sports. Councilmembers Hans Reimer and Andrew Friedson addressed the requests from constituents to relax the restrictions on competitive swimming. Dr. Earl Stoddard commented that PVS Swimming presented a thorough and safe plan and will provide a targeted approval for PVS clubs that will implement the plan. Clubs and organizations outside of PVS Swimming will need to submit their own plans for evaluation. Dr. Stoddard mentioned that if the plans mirror what PVS submitted, there is a strong chance they will be approved.

Update 5pm 8/24:

While we haven’t been able to locate the public posting of the document approving the plan submitted by PVS to the Department of Health and Human Services, we have seen some of the email correspondence. Here’s an excerpt from the approval:

“Based upon the review of your plan and associated supporting documents and video, Montgomery County is approving your plan to operate as described. Any club affiliated with PVS that meets the association-established guidelines will be approved for revised training protocols. This includes the allowance for supervised lane swimming up to a maximum of 4 concurrent competitive swimmers in a lane.”

This excerpt is consistent with what was discussed during the meeting this morning in that Dr. Stoddard made the distinction between recreational lap swimming and competitive swimming. Councilmember Rice made a statement that he was still wary of relaxing the restriction on the number of swimmers per lane and anecdotally spoke of seeing swimmers congregating at the ends of the pool during and at the conclusion of training sessions while not keeping an appropriate distance. Dr. Stoddard stated that according to the PVS plan, competitive swimming will be supervised, and the plan demonstrated how distancing would be achieved. He further stated that swimmers are used to taking (and implementing) direction from their coaches, thereby mitigating the risk brought forward by Councilmember Rice.

This will be updated with the approval announcement and other supporting details when available