We had a strong start to the "official" meet season on Saturday.  We always head into meets with 5 goals: good sportsmanship, no missed events, no DQs, be a supportive teammate, and try to get a personal best.  If we achieve these 5 goals, we have done all we could from our end and should be happy with whatever place we happen to get in the meet results.  We did end up having 1 DQ with an early take-off in our B medley relay, but other than that, we did pretty well with the other 5 goals.  Although not everyone earned a personal best, we did have 12 individual event personal bests and 5 more relay split personal bests, spread across our 9 swimmers, so we certainly did what we could to give us a chance to win the meet.

 

Our medley relays opened up very well.  The A team had 2 big drops from Patrick on the backstroke and James on the fly, with each dropping about 2.5 seconds off their previous best time.  Cooper and Blake were just tenths off their best time, so we crushed our seed time by over 4 seconds.  The B team also had some great swims to crush their seed time by over 7 seconds, but unfortunately had a DQ due to an early take-off.  Braxton led off with over a second drop in the 50 Back and Tristan, switching places with Camden who did the free leg of the relay, dropped over 3 seconds off his best time in the flat-start 50 Breast.  Jack would have had almost a 3-second personal best in his fly split and Camden, despite not being 100-percent with his legs, was only a half second of his previous best.

 

The 200 Free was the first individual event and we had 2 of the 3 boys entered in the event.  Blake had a late charge and a solid time just a few seconds off his best.  Levon certainly had the swim of the event though as he not only had a big 13.5 second personal best in the 200 Free, but he also had a 1.5 second personal best in the 100 Free with his strong opening split.  He may have found himself a new event after that swim!  After a 2-3 finish in the 200 Free, Cooper grabbed a 3rd in the 100 IM, swimming over a second faster than he did at the intrasquad meet.  The 50 Free saw us go 2nd and 4th with Patrick and Braxton each shaving a bit of time off their best.  Camden even had a personal best in the 50 Free on that injured leg after just missing a best time in the relay.  After the break, our fly-ers went 2-3.  Although James and Jack did not eclipse their relay split time from earlier, James had a best flat start time by a second en route to a runner-up finish with Jack close behind.  In the 100 Free, Blake had another strong final 50 to earn a personal best by just under a second, now just 2.5 seconds away from breaking that magic 1:00 barrier.  And, as if the 50 Free personal best on an injured leg wasn't impressive enough, Camden had a 2.5 second best in the 100 Free, touching out 3 other swimmers to grab 3rd place and give us our 3rd 2-3 finish on the day.  Spoiler alert...we went 2-3 in 6 events on Saturday!

 

After the second break, we had our first 2-3 relay finish of the day in the 200 Free Relay.  Patrick, James, and Braxton all had personal best 50 free splits in those relays.  The 50 Back was another 2-3 finish with Patrick and Braxton a little off the times they swam earlier in the meet, but Levon had a 1.5 second personal best with his 5th place finish in the event.  The 50 Breast not only saw us go 2-3, but 2-3-4 as Cooper swam almost identical to his split in the medley relay earlier in the day.  Both times were just tenths off his best time.  James dropped 1.5 seconds in his 50 Breast, sandwiched between Cooper and Jack.  We ended the day with a fun relay which was a 100 Free Relay using a candy cane as a baton.  We made 3 even-ish teams of 3 and had the lead-off legs also swim the anchor legs.  The boys looked like they had fun with it and it was a good segue into our relay meet this week.