A recent temporary tattoo trend has taken hold of the Bangor YMCA Barracudas swimming club, just in time for this weekend’s YMCA State Championships.

Thanks to coach Belinda Perry, who special-ordered the tattoos featuring a red barracuda with the letters BGRY (the team’s abbreviation), the Barracudas will make their entrance into UMaine’s Wallace Pool Saturday morning with the tattoos to defend their runner-up title from last year.

Don’t worry, parents – the tattoos are temporary (they fade after a few days).

“Long Reach [Swim Club] had them last year and we kept whining to Belinda about how much we wanted them, so we got them,” said Erin Woolley, a 16-year-old Barracuda who will swim the 200- and 500-yard freestyle events. “They’re really cool. The little kids think they’re great, so we’re really excited to have them.”

The 8-and-under age group kicks off at 8:30 a.m. Saturday.

The meet will feature five age groups, with swimmers 12 and under competing Saturday, and competitors 13 and over swimming Sunday.

Other local teams sending swimmers to the meet include Canoe City of the Old Town YMCA; the MDI Sharks of the MDI YMCA; the Piscataquis Regional YMCA in Dover-Foxcroft; the Downeast Family YMCA Dolphins of Ellsworth; and Bay Area Swim Club of the Waldo County YMCA in Belfast. Perry said 16 teams from within the state are competing.

The top 16 swimmers in every event will score and the winner of each heat will earn a ribbon. The top team in each age group and gender earns a championship, and the combined scores of all the age groups and both genders will be tallied for a team champion and runner-up.

Perry spent Tuesday night scoring out the meet according to the preliminary seeds and calculated the Barracudas to be about 40 points out of second place. Long Reach of Bath is seeded first and Pine Tree Swim Club of Portland is second. MDI should also be in competition for one of the top three spots.

The Barracudas were runners-up at this meet last year.

“We have a lot of swimmers in the top 16 and a lot on the outside who will move up,” Perry said. “It’s our state championships, and they’ll get fired up and race well.”

With the younger kids, the prizes are sometimes incentive enough to swim hard. The top eight finishers receive trophies, and Perry said sometimes that makes the kids seeded ninth and 10th push hard.

The same thing happens with the kids ranked at around 17 or 18, because the swimmers who finish 9-18 get ribbons. Perry has posted the seeding sheets at the pool so the kids know how far they are from the coveted prizes.

“That’s what means more to the kids than how many points, is the top-8 eight get trophies and top 16 get ribbons,” Perry said. “They’ll look at the times, and think, ‘Oh, I can do that,’ and they figure out what they need to do.”

One of the strongest Bangor age groups is the 8-and-under boys. There are 16 boys in the group, and Perry thinks all of them have the potential to score at the meet.

“They’re great because they’re good friends, they love to swim and they’re fun to watch,” she said. “They love racing. I expect them to do pretty good. They don’t care that much about their times, they just love racing each other.”