Coming off of two strong meets in January with our meet on 1/12 and the Varsity meet on 1/26, I felt like some of our swimmers have had a tough time focusing in practice and getting the most out of it these past few weeks.  Plus, with about half of the team still missing at the required 5:45pm arrival time tonight, we just did not fully seem ready to swim tonight.  I shared with the boys during practice that the heat sheet looked like Goochland might beat us tonight, but even though some of the boys were in off events, if we shoot for personal bests and get a bunch, we might be able to pull off the win.  Score aside, we did well early on going for our goals.  No one DQ'd, no one missed their event, and we had some impressive personal bests, especially early in the meet.

 

In the medley relay, Tripp Schnell dropped almost a second off his backstroke time to start off the relay and Atticus Morgan anchored in 25.77, his first time under 26 in the 50 Free as he tried to chase down the Goochland team who won the event.  The B team also had a great start to their relay with Matthew Harte Hackney dropping over 2.5 seconds off his 50 Back (spoiler: he went even faster by .80 seconds later in the meet in the 50 Back!).  The middle of that B relay, much like the middle of the A relay, had near-best splits, and much like the A relay with Atticus, Lowndes Peple had a personal best split in free, nearly breaking 30 for the first time (30.06).  The time drops kept coming in the 200 Free with some ridiculous drops.  Max Dyshlevyi went after it like he did at Collegiate in his first 200 Free.  He went out in his first 100 only 1.6 seconds slower than his personal best 100 Free!  He was able to hang on and swim a 2:25.60, dropping over 15 seconds and becoming the second fastest swimmer on the team in that event (after Will Franks).  Even more ridiculous was the time drop from Charlie Johnson.  After logging a 3:11 in the 200 Free time trial in December, his hard work over the past month and a half paid off in the form of 28.6 seconds of dropped time.  Wow!  Charlie was certainly nervous all week about swimming this, but I was confident he was ready to go and he certainly showed that tonight.

 

In the 100 IM, Tripp had an impressive drop of 8 seconds, while Tristan Litzenburg just missed his best time.  Will Franks won our first event of the night, blowing away the field in the 50 Free (5.6 seconds over 2nd place).  Our other 4 swimmers were close to best times, but given we all swam so great in the Varsity senior meet a few weeks ago, 50 and 100 Free personal bests were going to be hard to come by tonight.  Lowndes had a nice 3-second drop in 50 Fly, with Atticus just missing his best.  Lowndes also just missed a personal best with his 100 Free time, our only swimmer in the middle of the meet (100 Fly & 100 Free).  I already mentioned Matthew's continued time drop in the individual 50 Back.  Also congrats to Tripp and Max who each beat my 100 Back seed time for them by 3-4 seconds.  Tripp's time was actually a 10-second drop from early in the year while Max's was a 15-second drop from earlier in the year.  In the 50 Breast, RT Upson shaved off some time with Chris Rauchle dropping a substantial 4 seconds off his 50 Breast.  Chris and Coach Via have been working a ton on his breaststroke in recent weeks and this was on display tonight.  Tristan and Atticus had personal bests in their 100 Breast with Tristan about 4 second faster than his time a year ago.  The free relay saw a few personal bests with Tristan on the A and Max's leadoff leg of the B relay.  And again, quite a few close calls on personal bests for the other relay swimmers.

 

In fact, relay close calls almost decided the meet.  In the 200 Medley Relay, the A team was edged out by Goochland by .56 seconds.  Had we pulled off the win, it would have been a 12-point swing as we would have earned 6 more points and they would have earned 6 fewer points.  In the 200 Free Relay, our A relay looked like we let up a bit towards the end, with Collegiate sneaking in front of us by .02 seconds.  Had we held them off by going .03 seconds faster, we would have earned 4 more points.  The B team even had a close call, holding off the St. Bridget team by .29 seconds to stay locked in 5th place.  I point out these few relay instances because I knew this meet was going to be tight with Goochland, given what I saw on the heat sheet before the meet and just eyeballing how well they were doing during the meet.  Honestly, I was a little surprised when I looked at the final score as we ended up beating Goochland by 1 point, 218-217.  I thought we might have just slightly more depth, but their top-end swimmers were doing so well, I thought the depth might not matter.  If we didn't pull it off, I would point to those aforementioned relay close calls as one of the culprits.  This 7-0 record from the meet pushed us to 27-0 for the whole season, so congratulations to the boys on earning that undefeated record by the closest of margins!