Marysville swim captures county meet title
The Vikings might still be in the thick of their training with daily three-hour practices, but that didn’t stop them from swimming some of their fastest times of the season at last night’s For Sports St. Clair County meet.
With first-place finishes in seven of the 12 events, the Marysville girls swim and dive team won the meet with a team total 334 points, eclipsing Port Huron Unified (300), St. Clair (231), and Marine City (208).
“They’ve been swimming their best [times] for weeks now, and they just keep getting lower and lower times,” head coach Lisa Staszewski said. “As a coach, you don’t expect that until the end of the season, so when they’re doing that at the beginning of the season and still are showing the strength to carry that forward to the end of the season, that makes you really happy.”
Junior Joanna Roosa led the Vikings, winning the 50-yard and 100-yard freestyle races in 27.40 and 58.72 seconds, respectively. Junior Alison Jainer also picked up a win in the 200-yard freestyle, finishing in two minutes, 12.93 seconds, and senior Ava Hanners won the 200-yard IM with a time of 2:26.69.
Marysville also won each of the three relays:
Janer, Roosa, Ava Hanners, and Aubrey Hanners won the 200-yard medley relay in 2:05.79; Ava Hanners, Jainer, Roosa, and Isabella Egypt won the 200-yard freestyle relay in 1:48.95; and Aubrey Hanners, Egypt, Olivia Lewandowski, and Hannah Bockhausen won the 400-yard freestyle relay in 4:19.23.
"Our team showed immense team unity which is the most important part of being a team," Staszewski said. "I am so insanely proud of not just their performances, but their demonstration of teaming throughout the evening."
Each of their winning times was a season or career best, propelled by their talented local competition.
Port Huron Unified's Sophia Moore, a senior, was the swimmer of the meet after impressive performances in the 100-yard butterfly and 100-yard breaststroke.
“It’s really exciting. I wasn’t expecting it…It means a lot though,” Moore said. “I’ve put a lot of hard work into the sport. I’ve been swimming for about 11 years. I like racing, I love the adrenaline rush it gives you and the release of endorphins it gives you at practice. If I’m having a bad day I can go to swim [practice] and it just makes everything so much better.”
In the breaststroke, she won by nearly nine seconds in 1:10.26, and in the butterfly, she won by four seconds with a time of 59.30, which is a personal best and a qualifying time for both the MHSAA Division I State Finals and the Michigan Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association meet.
“I’m so excited. I've been training fly really hard. I was a breaststroker last year, but then I pulled my groin so I’ve just been recovering from that injury,” Moore said. “I’ve trained really hard in fly, so seeing the results in the pool makes me really excited.”
Sophomore Emma Hoy and junior Reagan Francis also picked up wins for the Red Dogs. Hoy finished first in the 500-yard freestyle with a commanding 19-second lead (6:27.15) and Francis won the 100-yard backstroke in 1:12.70, finishing first by more than seven seconds.
St. Clair picked up its only first-place finish of the night from sophomore Alyssa Schafer, who won on the diving board, totaling 269.75 points. Her junior teammate Grace Albrecht finished as runner-up with a total of 251 points.
The next major meet for high school swim and dive teams will be the MISCA meet, a statewide championship-style competition held on Oct. 7 and 8 at Calvin University. It’s a prelude to the MHSAA Regional and State Finals set for mid-November.
“We had amazing swims today,” Staszewski said. “I’m super excited to see them when the rest kicks in.”
View the full results here:
2022 - girls county results
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