The competitive high school swimming season has only just begun and already the athletes are being challenged.

Coach Jamie Roberts so far has four returning swimmers and two new swimmers, but she's wasting no time in making practice tougher and getting her team in winning form.

"They're already doing harder practices than where we would start," she said. "(It's) more like interval work where you're pushing yourself against the clock to do repeated distances of swimming. We might do 10 50-meters and they get a minute to do each 50."

Roberts said she wouldn't start the swimmers off so hard if...