[Breeze]

SAA Conference Championship- RESULTS

Day 1

Wednesday was relay day only...the 200 Medley and the 800 Free. Now before I get into any description, let me establish one point for ease of writing and understanding. For our particular purposes the relays were a 4 team affair - BSC, Centre, Rhodes, and Berry. The remain 3 teams lack the depth to compete in any relays, but especially the B relays, where you are now digging into your 5th through 8th best swimmers.


Bear

200 Medley Relay - Bear swam the free leg on the B relay. At the start of the race the Berry backstroker lost significant ground to the other top 3 teams. By the breaststroke leg, the team already trailed by about half a second (or half a body length). Mac (breaststroke leg), outclassed the Centre swimmer and moved the team in 3rd, but the other 2 teams remained well ahead. Ross was unable to close on the leaders and Bear dove in over a second and a half back. He looked amazing. Better than he's looked in a sprint in years, and he posted a strong 21.32 split. I'm pretty confident that's his fastest relay split ever, but there's no easy way to confirm that. Bear was unable to real in the Rhodes and BSC team and Berry settled for 3rd in the B.

However, the A relay is a different story. Billy did the back and just like the B relay he trailed by about half a second at the end of his leg. Here is where the difference starts - Sam Tate, was an absolute monster this weekend. He split a 24.83, only .7 behind Billy's back split. By the time his leg finished, he had gone from 4th to 2nd, blown by both BSC and Centre and trailed Rhodes by only .24 second. Noah was next, he too had a fantastic week. He split a 20.86, a full 1.4 seconds faster than the next closest split in the relay. Harrison dove in with the lead and held off all challengers as Berry won the relay. In fact, they recorded a meet and team record time of 1:30.38. The sad part is - they were .01 off of getting an NCAA D3 B cut time, which would have potentially allowed them to swim at the National Championships, as not many teams will get the B cut.

800 Free Relay - The B team of Ryan, Alex, Keith and Mac managed to take second in their heat. A nice showing with Alex swimming particularly well. Bear swam in the A relay, and the team started out with a good but not great swim from Ross. He managed a 1:42.5 split - but last year he was splitting 1:41 lows. Like 1:41.05 low, so he was off by 1.5 seconds and the team found themselves in 3rd place early. Ethan went second and split a 1:44.13. A good time for him, but he was expecting to go faster. Berry found themselves in 3rd place and 2 seconds back.

Bear was the next to swim and he took it out FAST. He opened with a 23.28 split, which is basically his 100 pace. He followed that up with a very good 25.72 for an opening 100 of 49 seconds, about .4 better than his 100 free personal best (albeit with a rolling start). His efforts cut into the second place team's lead by about .6 seconds, but at this point I was very concerned. In Bear's personal best 200 Free from last year's championship meet, he split a 51.23 in the first 100. He's 2.23 seconds faster than that, and he's NOT training distance. Unfortunately, the effort got him and he closed poorly, eventually recording a 1:47 second split, and ultimately losing 3rd place to Rhodes. The anchor only lost more ground and Berry settled for 4th.

I believe that Bear took the swim out too fast because of a combination of a couple of things. First, he's been training sprint, so the natural reaction is go to out like a sprint. Second, he didn't really do many 200s in season, especially after fully committing to sprinting, so he wasn't aware of how the race was going to impact him. Finally, he's done the 200 of years, and he knows how his body usually reacts, so he took it out like he would in a 200 thinking he was keeping something in reserve for the back half, but because he wasn't training distance that reserve ended up not being there.

Bear was crushed. He felt he really let the team down, and the coach felt she had really let Bear down, because she didn't get him properly prepped for the race. Honestly, if he had just gone out a bit more conservatively I think he could have split a very respectable 1:45, it was just too much under his new normal.