2012 Women’s Section VI Swimming
Swim fast…breathe later.
Author Unknown
Young Chautauqua County competitive swimmers are introduced to the water in programs with names like Jets (YMCA based), Sharks, and STAR (Southern Tier Aquatic Racers). They start as young as five years old (minnows?), and can race competitively as old as eighteen. STAR is the most advanced of these, affiliated with USA swimming, offering national-level competition to members. While the physical act of swimming fast and far is impressive, there is no athletic spectator experience quite like a swim meet. The venue is markedly different from a field or court; contested on a small body of water sitting in a fall-out shelter of solid construction and impossible acoustic integrity. By necessity, pools are steamy and filled with chemicals, and when the meet is contested in winter (most of the swim season) the transition from Western New York snow to the tropical pool environment fogs eyeglasses, straightens hair, and insists you dress in easily removable (and then replaceable) layers.
At the high school level, there has been a changing of the guard for women’s swimming in Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties. After thirty years the Panama High School women’s team broke through in the Frewsburg High School pool and won a meet against the Bears. After the epic win Coach Todd Conklin from Panama stated, “Bruce Johnson does a wonderful job and over the years they’ve been dominant and the team to beat in the world of swimming. The girls have been working extremely hard and we’ve been building for this. Tonight was our night.”
Thirty years is a big number but a single indicator of the dominance over area swimming by Frewsburg. Their long-time coach Bruce Johnson has put up monster numbers in his storied career, including a 21 year home winning streak, and 25 years (yes, that’s years) without a league loss. Those are Hall of Fame numbers. Frewsburg’s gaudy run of excellence, came to an end like all runs eventually do, and it’s a credit to Coach Conklin that he has built a program to compete and win, and change the conversation in local swim circles.
If Frewsburg is the gold-standard in the pool, Olean High School is not far behind, being the team to beat in their league for a run of seven years. So, when the wall was touched in the last event of the night, and not by an Olean Husky, there was another guard changed. The Southwestern High School girls swim team had eclipsed the Huskies for the first time in seven years by a score of 99-86. Coach Brown at Olean, like Coach Johnson from Frewsburg, has built a minor dynasty in high school swimming, and beating his team was no small feat. But the young Trojans was able to break through and change the dynamics of the local swim culture. The final relay team, as well as the swimmers who broke a school record in the 200 free relay earlier that evening, was made up of one eighth grader and three freshmen. After the win coach Glen Shoup from Southwestern recognized the team effort, “The girls have been working very hard not just last year but early this year and it is beginning to pay off. We look forward to the rest of our season and hope to bring home a Girls Swimming Class Sectional Championship to Southwestern this year,”
Yes, it’s a different world in the pool. You’ll want to check it out someday soon.
With the final touch on the wall -not a “touch-out” in the vernacular of the sport, but a significant, if surprising victory- the generous cacophony ratcheted involuntarily up, a reflex response framing the intensity of this final race of the swim meet. Cheers pounded walls and ceiling and deck. Riotous roars were thrown back as white noise, compromising equilibrium, all up in your grill. The ovation of surprise and joy, hooting, and hands clapping lapped itself going out and returning as source and echo passed each other, raising decibel levels like a cartoon thermometer in a fever patient, fit to burst. This really happened. We really got to the wall first. We really won!
Competitive swimming is a daunting proposal. Practices are two-plus hours, six days a week of effort in a chlorine bath, staring at the bottom of a pool through Plexiglas goggles, and breathing only on scheduled breaks. If you think you’re physically fit, follow a swimmer for a workout, you will be convinced otherwise. Swim meets are a uniquely individual proposition folded into a team sport (like track and field, golf, wrestling, and politics). The stark reality of swimming is in the measurement of achievement; touch the wall first, you win, a first place ribbon, your name in the paper. Otherwise your name is secondarily attached to a less significant number that you compare to all the other numbers and see where you stand. You own that result for the moment. It defines you, however briefly. There is almost never an official to indict, a teammate to blame, or a coach’s decision to second-guess. There is only you and the water and that elusive finish line you reel in with effort and skill and heart.
Then you climb out of the water in your skivvies and rubber cap and get ready to do it again.
2013 Women’s State Swim Meet
Swimming is a racing sport, like track; you line up by your competitor and GO, first one to the finish line wins. But it’s far less intimate, the competitors remarkable by their lane and their swimsuit, maybe a distinct swim cap bobbing in a wake. You can track progress in both disciplines, but in track you trace effort and anguish on the face of the runner. The clues in swimming are far more subtle, hiding in the splash and flailing arms, flutter kicks, and explosions off an unforgiving wall.
Every fast high school swimmer in New York gathered at Ithaca College last Friday and Saturday for the NYSPHAA Women’s state swim championships. Every single one. With due respect to most other high school sports, players only have to compete against schools with similar enrollment. Not so in the swimming. These athletes are sculpted from the resistance of their medium (water), their super-human training (months face-down in a pool), and the repeated use of every muscle in the body required to excel in the sport. There are no weaklings at the NYSPHAA swim championships.
The 2013 swim meet was particularly impressive. Some highlights:
-The local contingent, from Southwestern, Jamestown, Dunkirk, and Olean consisted of six sophomores and two freshmen. That’s quite a youth movement, and if you are a sports fan in general, and swim enthusiast in particular, you will get used to reading the names of tenth graders Xiane Smith, Sydney Thomas, Katie Lawton, and Kelsey Powers from Southwestern, Megan Marsh from Jamestown, and Makayla Sargent from Olean, along with ninth graders Sydney Burk from SW, and Diedra Osula from Dunkirk.
-Sargent is one of those athletes people will be talking about years from now, Yeah, I saw her swim in PERSON! She is a wildly competitive fish-in-the-water. This year she swam the 100 Fly at states, a discipline she hadn’t excelled at yet in the regular season; Why is she swimming the Fly at states? All she did was swim the fastest time of the day in prelims. She can swim anything. She’s fast at every stroke, but you only get two individuals at states. In the finals of her other event, the 200IM, she set a pool and state record.
-The 50 Free is a fast-twitch, pulse-raising, water-pounding down-and-back, human jet-ski race. In the prelims Katie Smith from Pittsford, in suburban Rochester, set a state record 23:05. If you happened to blink at the wrong time you missed the fastest single sprint in the history of high school swimming in New York State. In the finals Xiane Smith and two-time defending champion Dina Rommel from Clarence High hit the wall simultaneously, and at that precise moment the scoreboard went dark. It got very quiet in the pool for a few anxious moments, and when the dust cleared and the lights came back on Rommel had a third straight state title, with Smith an eye-blink behind.
-The Clarence High School team was the talk of the meet. Their 200 medley relay team, featuring four seniors racing for the last time in high school, hit the wall in a state record time…and was disqualified when one swimmer left the block a tick of a fraction of a second early. They went from first place and all-hail-glory to an afterthought; state champions to being brushed from existence, as if they never entered the pool head-first. Not second, not third, not even last place. Disqualified! DQ, Dairy Queen. Just a brutal way to go out. They later went out with a vengeance, those same four seniors, and spanked the state record in the 400 free relay by more seconds than records deserve to be broken; a staggering 3:26, five full seconds faster than their qualifying time. A record for a pool that hosts college meets. Oh, and they won the overall team title, despite the DQ. Can you say redemption?
-Sydney Thomas, a lanky, speedy sophomore from Southwestern came to the meet seeded 33rd in the 100 back. She was able to drop her time a full second-and-a-half, finishing seventh. That’s called clutch racing. The Southwestern team’s qualification in the 400 Free relay (3:39.79) at sectionals was an unexpected surprise, and didn’t come until the final race of that meet. At states Xiane Smith, Thomas, Sydney Burk, and Katie Lawton shaved two more seconds for a 3:37.82 and a twelfth-place finish.
-Sophomore Megan Marsh of Jamestown, switching from an all-state cross-country runner to an all-state swimmer, finished seventeenth in the 200 IM, and eleventh in the 100 breaststroke.
-Freshman Deidra Osula of Dunkirk/Fredonia/Silver Creek swam the 50 Free, finishing thirteenth with a 24.48.
-Finally, the Southwestern 200 Free relay team (Smith, Powers, Burk, Lawton) desperately wanted then first three numbers on the final scoreboard to read 1:39. They’d cut time in the last four races, and that was their goal for the state meet. When the anchor touched the wall the clock read 140.22. Never mind that this was their fastest time ever, and never mind that they are three sophomores and a freshman. It simply wasn’t the number they wanted. Three-tenths of a second short of their goal, literally the length of a finger, the beat of a heart, standing between sadness and elation, between hugs and another year of work.
And that, my friends, is swimming too.
2014 Women’s State Swim Meet
There is a mass of muscle and sinew purposefully moving on the deck of the Ithaca College Aquatics Center, bunched super-fit human specimens in various stages of dress from swims to sweats with deck-coats, fondling swim caps and goggles. There are slippery porpoises sliding in fluid concert in the pool around which that deck is wrapped.
The 2014 New York State Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships played out over two days last weekend. Forty-three high schools participated. Southwestern High School sent six swimmers, five who competed and one alternate. The five that competed (for the record, Sydney Thomas, Xiane Smith, Jillian Lawton, Katie Lawton, and Sydney Burk) swam in three individual races and three relay races. As a team they finished tied for tenth, which is highly impressive. The feat elevates a little when you know the teams that finished ahead of them. Consider this list:
Place School High School enrollment
1. Pittsford 1,998
2. Bemore Merrick 1,371+ 1,289 (yeah, they have 2 high schools)
3. Orchard Park 1,577
4. Ithaca 1,418
5. Fairport 1,639
6. Clarence 1,650
7. Pelham 848
8. Horace Greely 1,319
9. Clarkstown 1,547 South High + 1,482 at North High
T-10th. Southwestern 444 (tied with Shenendehowa at 2,188)
Anything stick out there? Break down those numbers any way you like and you can see that the five swimmers that competed did a pretty special job. They were one of only 12 schools to score over 100 points, and placed third from Section VI behind Orchard Park (1,577 students) and Clarence (1,650). Thomas, Smith and Katie Lawton are juniors. Burk and Jillian Lawton are sophomores. Their names are currently on the Southwestern pool record board six times in various combinations.
2015 Women’s State Swim Meet
I believe talent is like electricity. We don`t understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that.
Electricity arced through the Ithaca Athletics and Events Center for the 2015 NYSPHAA women’s state swim meet. It was there, where maybe it shouldn’t have been what with a chlorine sea pooled at our feet. But it was there nonetheless, charging off the walls and ceiling, barely contained, from spectator to spectator and down into the pool to the competitors.
I swear I saw it.
Electricity, like faith, something you can’t see except in the effect it has on that which it touches. You’d be hard pressed to name another athletics contest as impressive as a state swim meet. The specific qualities of building materials needed to house a chemical-filled, heated lake tend to echo sound, all tile and glass and hard surfaces. There’s little to dampen the background murmur of a thousand people (much less their shouts) save fellow spectators and a few hundred beach towels. And the passion that binds naturally to athletics that feature a single competitor and a clock make each effort a little more extraordinary. There is nothing quite like a swimmer on the final leg of their heat, one they’ve spent a season, a year, a lifetime preparing for, and the anxious, breathless, dizzying journey of the people who care deeply how they finish. You hope viscerally that they get to the wall faster, you pray for the damned clock to suspend, to please slow down this one time while your daughter, your sister your teammate, your friend gets through the water and to the wall. It’s excruciating, and vivid and shrill and acute. And then you look up at the clock and there is a number that’s attached to that person, for better or worse.
Bill Burk's collective writing...and some other stuff. 