State Swim Meet Part II

Everyone safely made it to Ocala. The boys stayed at their hotel with the coach--we didn't plan ahead enough to book rooms at the same hotel, so I don't have any pictures from breakfast. We all made it to the venue, and Bode was nice enough to snap a picture with me after his warmup.

Our other coaches were not able to attend the meet, so I was lucky enough to get deck-access while Ashley was up in the stands. I tried to get some pictures of the boys, but I'm not a good photog. Here's a decent one of the boys and Coach Jasson before their first event.

The first event was the preliminaries for the 200 Medley Relay. The boys came in seeded 19th, and the top 16 make the finals, so they had some work to do. Bode swims the third leg (the butterfly), and he swam a very fast 50 (24.89 seconds).

The results are usually posted quickly so teams know if they made the finals. However, these results took forever; evidently TWO teams DQ'd, and both teams were faster than our boys, so we ended up making the B-final by finishing 16th :-)

Bode had a bit of a rest before his first event (the 100-fly). He swam the fastest he had ever swum a week ago at Regionals with a time of 53.74. Here's his race. I was standing next to Coach Jasson, and we originally though Bode was going slow because the boy in lane 1 was beating him. However the boy in lane 2 had a much faster qualifying time than Bode, and he was keeping pace with him.

Ashley also got a good picture of Bode mid-swim.

Bode finished in a best-ever time of 53.14; he was 12th after the preliminaries and made the B-final! His next event was the 100-back. He swam a personal best of 57.03, but he ended up 19th (of 24) after the prelims, so he didn't make the B-final for this event. 

The last event of the morning session was the 4x100 freestyle relay. Here are the boys staying loose before the race.

The boys came in seeded 19th, so we knew it was a long-shot for them to make the finals. Below is the video--Bode swam the lead-off leg, and he swam a personal best of 50.44.

All the boys swam the fastest they had ever swum, but the team finished 17th, 0.91 seconds behind the 16th place team. This ended the morning sessions. We were fortunate in that both Bode and Zach qualified for the B-final in their events (Zach swims the 50-free) as well as the medley relay. Thus, we had to figure out what to do for three hours before we had to be back at the pool. Stay tuned.