The larger, more established competitive team, the Edge Swim Club, went away satisfied, and the other team presumably did, too.
Successful Defense
“We got what we wanted,” Patrick Moran, the outspoken founder of the sophisticated and strongly successful Edge Swim Club, said this morning.
“Our team continued to grow throughout the winter, which was important, and we ended up with more space and the same amount of time that we had before in the water.”
The Edge remains, as it previously was, Culver City’s home team.
Kudos for LaPointe
Credit for the peaceful settlement should go to Parks and Recreation Director Bill LaPointe, Mr. Moran said.
Their relationship seems to have improved from frosty to warm over the past several months.
“Bill went to great pains to make this work,” the Edge executive said. “We had a couple of very heated confrontations in the beginning. But all of that is behind us.”
The Tipping Point
Whether it was exhaustion or intellectual clarity that brought the warring sides around, according to Mr. Moran, he and Mr. LaPointe just happened upon a solution.
They have resolved their differences man to man in a most sporting manner.
Mr. LaPointe is known to enjoy brisk constitutionals. At 35 years old, Mr. Moran, the younger party, remains an athlete in full bloom.
Walking the Walk
One morning Mr. Moran spotted his recent adversary out for a stroll that more closely resembled a jog.
Hustling, he caught up with Mr. LaPointe. That seemed to change everything.
“Now we have gotten into the habit of taking walks,” Mr. Moran said. “And we have made a lot of strides.
“What we do is walk and talk. Half an hour, 45 minutes, every 2 or 3 weeks.
“I have come to enjoy our walks, and I really look forward to them.”
Mr.LaPointe was not available for comment this morning.
He may have been out walking.
Royal Gets Its Way, in Part
The acrimonious debate, which ran publicly for weeks last autumn, was sparked by the still-like-new Royal Team, which sought and won more time in The Plunge.
By the end of negotiations, Royal, who practices split squad-style at several sites, had multiplied its schedule at the busy Plunge.
Instead of being limited to one morning a week, Royal has The Plunge for weekday evenings.
Was It the Same-Old?
To parents and veteran swim instructors who measure their time in the sport by decades rather than years, the familiar parameters of this blowup looked like still another boys-will-be-boys scenario.
A backyard fight.
What’s to worry about?
But the battle quickly escalated into a more elaborate showdown than usual.
It reached into, and directly involved, the highest offices of City Hall — the City Manager Jerry Fulwood, all 5 members of the City Council and Mr. LaPointe, the second-year Parks and Rec director.
Getting a Little Warm
Tempers and rhetoric quickly reached a boiling point.
Everybody had an opinion, especially the adult leaders of the rival swim teams — even people who did not have an explicit stake in the outcome.
Royal, which brought the original claim, said it deserved equal standing with Edge, an admittedly amorphous objective.
Shrewd or Unfair?
Edge said that Royal was trying to unfairly capitalize on Edge’s success.
Edge charged that year-old Royal was crudely trying to play catch-up with the Culver City team’s finely tuned engine. One way, Edge said, was by sharing pool time so that Royal could proselytize rival swimmers. Edge said this is an unheard-of practice at any competitive level, and it was determined to stave off this challenge.
Edge accused Royal of trying to take a shortcut to attain its own success with unsupported claims while simultaneously recruiting players already developed by other teams.
At the end, what the teams may have shared was a satisfactorily split decision.
