State Swim Meet

 The state swim meet was this past weekend. All our boys swam PRs in their individual events, but we just missed making the finals in them with the exception of Jachym; he made the 100-breast stroke final and got sixth (he is awesome at this stroke).

Bode ended up 18th overall in the butterfly, just missing the B-final by a few tenths of a second.

He was a little bummed because he thinks he can break the elusive 53 second barrier. Bode also swam on the 4x100 freestyle relay. The team qualified 14th, so they made the B-final. However, the boys weren't all that concerned about their place in this relay, so two of the boys graciously gave up their spots and let our two alternates swim (Jaicob and Zack Radka traveled to the meet as alternates and would not have swum had Eric and Zach Smith not done this). Bode swam the lead-off leg of this relay and he smashed his personal best by almost 1.5 seconds coming in at 48.79. He was stoked because he now has an SES cut in the 100 fly and 100 free and two bonus cuts in the 200 fly and 200 free.

But the main event was the 200 Medley Relay. The teams swim preliminaries in the morning, and we qualified in fourth place. The finals were in the evening, and we knew we had to swim fast. Below is a move. Eric swims our backstroke (the first leg). The boy next to him is Ethan Ekk. Ethan is going to Stanford next fall. His best stroke is the 200-back, and he was in the top 8 in the WORLDs in this stroke. This is why he gets such a huge lead on the field. Note we also couldn't get down on the pool deck to cheer them on. Sarah took this video, and Ashley and I were not near her wish is why you don't hear us in the video.

Here is a better, wider-angled view of the same race.

You can see the boys throw up their arms at the end because the scoreboard showed them in THIRD PLACE!!! Even better was beating the dreaded Niceville team :-)

There is even a medal ceremony.

Here is a close up shot.

Below is a shot of the whole team on the deck.

We also took some post-meet pics. Note the boys 4x50 relay team took 6th in the state, so they also medaled.

And we have to finish with three proud moms...

We stayed in Orlando for a few days after the meet. I'll post some of those pics in a separate post.