About DCST
The DeKalb County Swim Team (DCST) is a year-round YMCA affiliated / USA Swimming team.
About DCST
Welcome to the DeKalb County Swim Team (DCST) and the Kishwaukee Family YMCA. We are honored that you have chosen to become part of the DCST community.
Since 1980, DCST has proudly served DeKalb County and Northern Illinois through a year-round competitive swimming program dedicated to developing athletes of character, confidence, and excellence. For more than four decades, swimmers, coaches, families, volunteers, officials, alumni, and YMCA staff have worked together to create an environment in which athletes are challenged to achieve their personal best, both in and out of the water.
DCST has a proud tradition of developing swimmers from introductory and local competition through collegiate and national-level swimming. Those accomplishments are an important part of our history, but they are not the whole story.
Our greatest success is measured not only by medals, records, or championships, but by the confidence, integrity, resilience, discipline, friendships, and lifelong appreciation for healthy competition that swimmers carry with them beyond the pool.
Whether an athlete is learning a first legal stroke, pursuing a championship qualifying standard, preparing for collegiate swimming, continuing to compete after college, competing at the national level, or simply enjoying the camaraderie of teammates and coaches, every swimmer deserves exceptional coaching, meaningful challenges, and the opportunity to reach their fullest potential.
Mission
DCST exists to provide a year-round competitive swimming program that develops swimmers through excellent coaching, healthy competition, personal responsibility, sportsmanship, and meaningful opportunities for growth at every level of the sport.
Vision
DCST seeks to be a healthy, technically strong, inclusive, and highly competitive YMCA and USA Swimming program that serves athletes from introductory competition through collegiate, postcollegiate, and national-level swimming while preserving a lifelong connection to the sport and to the DCST community.
Enduring Values
As the competitive swimming program of the Kishwaukee Family YMCA, DCST is grounded in the YMCA's core values of Caring, Honesty, Respect, and Responsibility.
These values guide how we treat one another, how we conduct ourselves, how we make decisions, and how we represent the YMCA and the DeKalb County Swim Team.
Within competitive swimming, DCST expresses these values through four enduring principles:
Character through honesty, integrity, personal responsibility, respect for others, and doing what is right even when no one is watching.
Excellence through preparation, discipline, courage, continuous improvement, and the pursuit of each athlete's fullest potential.
Community through caring for one another, teamwork, service, volunteerism, inclusion, and a shared commitment to the success of the entire program.
Sportsmanship
through respect for teammates, competitors, coaches, officials, volunteers, and the sport itself; humility in success; resilience in disappointment; and fairness in competition.
These principles are not separate from the values of the Kishwaukee Family YMCA. They are the way DCST seeks to live those values through competitive swimming.
Together, these values guide DCST in pursuing excellence, supporting teammates, competing with integrity, accepting responsibility for development, and carrying the lessons of swimming beyond the pool.