Teams finish in ninth and 12th overall
Bellarmine won the boys title and Archbishop Mitty captured the
girls
– again – but the San Benito High School swim team walked away
from last week’s Central Coast Section championship at Stanford
University holding its head up high.
Teams finish in ninth and 12th overall
Bellarmine won the boys title and Archbishop Mitty captured the girls – again – but the San Benito High School swim team walked away from last week’s Central Coast Section championship at Stanford University holding its head up high.
The Baler boys’ team finished ninth overall and the younger girls’ squad finished twelfth.
“Of the top nine [boys] teams seven of them were private schools,” San Benito High coach Leif Nordstrom said. “So I guess you could say of the public schools we were in the top two or three that were there.”
And for the first time in the last handful of years no freak accidents, disqualifications, false starts or sicknesses hurt the Balers.
“A few years ago we were disqualified in a relay, and Blaine [Curtis] was real sick last year and battling nose bleeds,” Nordstrom said. “When I noticed it all actually going well this year I was afraid to say anything.”
Although no one in a Baler bathing cap won a section title in any event, several Baler swimmers did well enough to crack into the top 16 in the preliminary heats to earn a coveted spot in the finals.
Leading the way in impressive performances for the Balers was senior David Smith, who finished second in the section in both the 50 and 100 freestyle events. In the 50 free, he missed tapping the wall ahead of Valley Christian’s freshman standout Shane Fleming by a mere 1/16th of a second.
Fleming, at 6-foot-8 and with a ton of speed, is already considered to be a strong candidate to make the U.S. Olympic team.
“David was ahead the whole time until Fleming’s reach finally edged him out at the very end,” Nordstrom said.
Nordstrom was most impressed with the way Smith rose to the occasion all year long when it mattered most.
“He can be a frustrating cat for those other swimmers that work hard all year,” Nordstrom said. “David has fun the whole season and then finds a way to focus the last three or four weeks. He hones it down and focuses enough to pull out incredible times at CCS.”
In the girls’ competition, sophomore Shelli Reed took fifth place in the 100 freestyle and 12th in the backstroke.
Reed’s time at the halfway mark of the 100 freestyle, which would be the 50 free, would have put her in the top eight at CCS.
“She might be evolving into a sprinter,” Nordstrom said. “That’s what happened to David Smith. He started out in the backstroke, too, but then switched to freestyle. Shelli could have made the finals in some of the sprint events. I just had to find the right two. She is an incredibly hard worker.”
Although he lost the league diving championship to Salinas’ Sam Figueroa, Baler senior Jason Andrade edged past his counterpart in the section meet by a single place and wound up finishing seventh overall in the 1-meter spring board competition – despite getting some questionable scores by the judges in the early stages of the event.
“I was impressed how well Jason handled CCS,” Nordstrom said. “It was his third year this year at CCS, so he did know how to deal with the aura of it all. But he did get some bad scores by some of the judges in the first two dives that almost made me come unglued. But he wasn’t flustered and after the third and forth dive the respect went up and so did his scores. Had it not been for those bad scores in the beginning, he would have finished fourth or fifth.”
The Balers also showed their depth in the relay events at Stanford as the girls team finished sixth overall in the 200 free relay and the boys took eighth in that same event.
The four-swimmer girls’ team for that event included Reed, Demi Gatrell, Katie Buzzetta and Megan Geary.
The group of boys that took eighth in the 200 freestyle were: Smith, Blaine Curtis, John Kaplanis and James Schafer.
Another big accomplishment was sophomore Brandon Drogemuller finishing 13th in the 500 freestyle event.
“I think the boys’ team did what it set out to do at CCS,” Nordstrom said. “We didn’t just show up at CCS, we excelled. The girls didn’t win league, but they excelled at CCS as well.”
Next year, the Baler boys’ team will have its work cut out for it to try and repeat as league champions while the girls’ team could be the favorites for a few years to come.
“Our top 10 swimmers on the boys’ team are graduating this year,” Nordstrom said. “On the girls’ side, six are graduating but only one of them made it to CCS. So the girls’ team will be stronger next year while the boys’ team could have a little tougher road of it in the TCAL.”
