It was an EXCITING night in the pool! We hosted 9 teams for our annual BRC/VIC conference championship swim meet! We started our meet day by eating lunch together and wearing our swim T-shirts to class. At lunch, the boys made posters together to show team support, unity, and get themselves pumped up!
We’d like to take this time to say thank you to those who came out. We had many familiar faces come by and cheer us on or helped to run the meet. A HUGE shout out to Coach Ben Paris & Coach Jennifer Oditt for manning the table, our meet would literally not run without you two keeping us moving through the events and recording times to score the meet. Another shout out to Dr. Tung for being our meet starter and second official for the evening! But also another shout out to Tara Medlin & Liz Moriarty for working our concession stand!
As said before, it was exciting because we had almost all of the young men who raced drop time in at least one of their events, and our 400 freestyle relay qualified for States!! Due to our large number of swimmers, our depth came to our advantage. While we did have several third place finishes such as Josh Sandler in the 200 IM, Brandon Bordelon in the 100 fly, and our 200 (Burton, Liu, Kennedy, Vale) & 400 Free (Rogers, Sandler, Fragoso, Bordelon) Relays, we also had Brandon Boredelon score a 2nd place in the 100 back! But our biggest asset came from the fact that the meet was scored out to 8 places, so that means that in the 200 free Scott Kennedy’s 5th place, Peter Ferrante’s 6th, and Jean-Lu Latry’s 8th place finishes all scored points!
In the 200 IM Sandler came in 4th, Saul Fragoso came in 5th, and Ben Gregori came in 8th and all earned points. In the 100 Fly all 3 of our swimmers scored: Brandon Bordelon’s 3rd place, Fragoso’s 7th, and Bennett Soles completed this event for the first time ever and got 8th place!! We continued to rack up points with Josh Sandler getting 3rd in the 100 free, while Caesar Jackson got 7th, and Ashton Burton took 5th in 500 while Liam Rafizadeh scored 8th. Bordelon’s 2nd place in the backstroke was accompanied by Caesar Jackson’s 7th place. After which, in the 100 breaststroke Caleb Rogers took 4th place, Vale took 5th, and Gregori took 7th!
All of these individual scores added up. While we may not have taken 1st or 2nd very often, we had depth that allowed us to pick up a multitude of points and carry us to a second place finish over all!!
Coach Markunas was voted by fellow VIC coaches, and was named to be the VIC Coach of the Year for the 2nd consecutive year. The boys seemed very proud of their coach for being recognized, and she was beyond flattered & honored.
Many of the boys had PR’s tonight, which is a testament to their hard work in practice of the past few weeks! Several of these young men will be traveling next week to go to our State Swim meet up in Northern VA.
