Riptide Swim Team was founded and started in 2002 by Head Coach Shandra Richardon. Shandra grew up swimming competitively in Northern VA for Curl Burke (now NCAP) and swam at the College of William and Mary. After coaching in the NVSL for close to ten years for the Virginia Run Swim Team, she wanted to start a winter swim program to encourage her summer swimmers to continue swimming throughout the winter without the demands of a lot of the other large USA teams in the area. She was able to secure lanes at the Freedom Aquatic Center in Manassas, and Riptide Swim Team became an official PVS/USA Swim Team.

The mission of Riptide is to create a safe, healthy, fun and positve swimming environment where the focus is on stroke technique, quality practices, and encouragement. Swimming is such a technical sport and it's the fine tuning of the strokes, starts, turns, and finishes that makes all the difference! 

We also want to help our swimmer and families find the right balance between family, school, swim, and other activities. As much as we love the sport of swimming, life shouldn't revolve around just swimming. Young athletes shouldn't specialize in a sport until late in to high school, so by providing our swimmers/families with the options to swim only once or twice a week, they don't get burned out and they continue to love to swim hopefully through adult hood while still enjoying other sports and activities too!

In 2005, Riptide expanded to the Cub Run RecCenter where the Cub Run Head Coach, Coach Florence Emanuel, runs an amazing program. Coach Florence grew up competitively swimming as well and she too, focuses on stroke technique with all of her swimmers. She also leads the team in the PVS meets where we compete against other PVS teams in Northern Virginia. We always say though Riptide is a smaller PVS team, we are MIGHTY because our swimmers are always smiling and always improving!

To all of our past, present, and future Riptide swimmers and families, thank you for all of your support of Riptide! It is a true blessing and privilege to work with your children! It's our hope and prayer that we've created happy and positive swimming experiences and memories for all of our swimmers!