Despite a very long layoff from competition, from December 12th to January 23rd, and all of the chopped up days of practice in between, the boys once again rose to the occasion at our meet this past Thursday.  They did a great job executing our goals of sportsmanship, teammate support, personal bests, no DQs, and no missed events, the latter of which was more of a challenge due to the pace and tone of the meet.

 

We pretty much had everyone with at least one personal best, many of which had multiple personal bests.  This included a first-time swim, two elite performances with a few more close calls, several double-digit time drops, and a few boys who even earned two different personal bests in one swim.

 

We got out of the gates with some great relay swims with three of the four swimmers in both A and B medley relay teams earning personal bests (the other two guys were close).  The A team particularly had their hands full with the New Community team, but built a small lead after breaststroke and held on during the final two legs for a 1.6 second victory.  Our B team was strong, dispatching the A team from 5 other schools, showing off our depth.  The first individual event was the 200 Free where we had 4 of the 8 entries.  George Estill cruised to a 21-second victory, earning an "elite performance" time, putting him 20th on the STC MS all-time list in the event, 2 seconds ahead of Olympic gold & silver medalist, Charlie Swanson.  George also logged another win and "elite performance" in the 100 Free, with his time ranking him 22nd on the STC MS all-time list.  Our other trio in the 200 Free had quite a night as Charlie Johnson dropped close to 14 seconds, breaking 2:30 for the first time, Jackson Gardner dropped almost 12 seconds, and James Pickren had a first-time swim (he missed our time trial 200 Free in December), but he did beat my seed time by 11 seconds.  Charlie and Jackson both also earned a personal best in the 100 Free thanks to a strong opening split in their 200 Free.  That is quite an impressive accomplishment.  This crew was pretty nervous about doing the 200 Free, but the coaches had confidence that they would do well and they certainly did.  Charlie was even about 3/4 of a second from giving us a 1-2 finish (with George) in the event.  We did squeak out a small personal best from Max Dyshlevyi in the 100 IM, but it was the 100 Free that was similar to the 200 Free with some solid time drops.  Lowndes Peple dropped a second, Woods Taliaferro dropped 2.5 seconds, and Daniel Basmajian had a nice drop of 4.5 seconds.

 

In the 50s, we racked up the personal bests.  The 50 Free produced 6 personal bests, including Patrick Santangelo and Lowndes both breaking 30 seconds for the first time, something Blake Reed did for the first time on a relay split earlier in the meet.  Tristan Dunston had a big drop in this event with over a 6-second personal best.  Speaking of 6 seconds of dropped time, Levon Morgan dropped just about that in his 50 Fly and Jack Bodt doubled that improvement in his 50 Fly, dropping a whopping 12.5 seconds from 54 to 42.  Braxton Moore and Charlie each dropped 2 seconds in their 50 Back and had it not been for a big 3-second personal best in the opening leg of the B medley relay, Patrick would have had a 2-second drop in this 50 Back.  There were 3 more drops in the 50 Breast as Jack Bodt once again dropped a large amount of time, 6.5 seconds to be exact.  Tristan also had another big drop, this time at 4.5 seconds.  James also dropped, with his 1.5 second improvement getting him closer to that 40-second barrier.  Christian Smith, who won the event, was .08 seconds from an elite performance, something only 19 previous STC MS swimmers have done in 50 Breast.

 

In the final event of the night, the 200 Free Relay, we duplicated our relay finish from earlier in the meet, going 1st and 4th, although our A team doubled their cushion from 1.5 to 3 seconds.  Despite being the fourth and final event for everyone, we still had 7 personal bests across the 16 relay swimmers.  In case you have not been counting, we had 34 personal bests on the night (out of 57 total swims, including relays).  I would say that 60% is an awesome improvement rate, especially given the short 2-hour time frame in which to swim the 3-4 events per boy.

 

In the score, we once again dominated thanks to our depth.  We did win 5 of the 9 events with both relay wins, George in the 200 Free and 100 Free as well as Christian in the 50 Breast.  But, thanks to our depth, we once again more than doubled the second place team's score.  Our 426 was well ahead of New Community with 208 and Millwood with 188.  This pushed our record to 17-0 on the season with still several meets to go.