Swimmers take second at state

Posted 11/4/14

“I give a lot of credit to the girls for holding on to the second place,” said PHS head coach Luke Robertson.

A total of 10 Powell girls and relay teams swam to top-six positions across the dozen state events; PHS also earned another seven …

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Swimmers take second at state

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The final day of the Class 3A swim meet didn’t start particularly great for the Powell High School girls, but it sure ended well.

The Lady Panther swim team overcame an early relay disqualification on Saturday to fight off both Lander and Worland for second place at the state meet in Gillette.

“I give a lot of credit to the girls for holding on to the second place,” said PHS head coach Luke Robertson.

A total of 10 Powell girls and relay teams swam to top-six positions across the dozen state events; PHS also earned another seven top-12 places in the state consolation finals.

The Lady Panthers finished with a total of 166 points, well behind Jackson, which ran away with the title with 328 points and three title-winning relay teams. Lander finished third with 149 points, followed closely by Worland with 145 points.

“As a team, I thought we looked really good,” Robertson said, adding, “almost everybody had their best time ever ... which is what you want to see.”

Saturday began with the 200 medley relay and something that no coach wants to see.

Swimmer Amanda Tracy took her place and was waiting for the starting beep — the relay team was eyeing the PHS record after coming up just .2 seconds short in Friday’s preliminaries — when she flinched.

Tracy thinks the “subconscious” twitch might have been some nerves and perhaps a longer-than-normal gap between the “take your mark” announcement and the beep. It meant a disqualification and missing out on what likely would have been a second-place finish and 26 team points.

After that, “I knew it was going to be — and I’m sure the girls knew it was going to be — extremely close,” Robertson said of the race for the silver medal. Powell’s team ranking would slide to as low as eighth place during the day.

“The girls were obviously distraught, but there was no room to dwell on something we couldn’t change,” said assistant PHS swim coach Tanya Fawcett-Kay Bonner. “So they fired back with everything they had.”

In the first event following the relay, the 200 freestyle, sophomore Aly Schneider posted her best time of the year to earn third place, senior Tasha McKelvey earned fifth and sophomore Emily Doughty took 11th.

Tracy, meanwhile, didn’t have a whole lot of time to fret about the flinch.

“I felt really terrible, but all the girls on my team, girls from other teams, coaches from my team and coaches from other teams all sort of lifted me up and told me that it was going to be OK,” Tracy said, calling their support “awesome.”

As she began warming for the 200 yard individual medley, “I was trying really hard to make my mind a blank slate,” Tracy said.

“I just had to remind myself that I wouldn’t be like evicted from Powell just because I disqualified our relay,” she said. “It was all going to be OK in the long run.”

It ended up better than that.

Tracy swam to her best time ever: 2:18.10. She cleared the field by more than three and a half seconds.

“I knew she had the potential to win that event, (but) I didn’t expect her to cut as much time as she did,” Robertson said. It was the second-fastest 200-yard individual medley time in recorded Powell High School history.

“I felt fast,” Tracy said of her feeling mid-swim. “But I was more focused on trying not to throw up.”

The happiness of claiming the title was dampened a bit by the relay error, but “it still was good,” Tracy said.

Meanwhile, the PHS girls kept piling up points and battling back to the top of the leader board.

Senior Stephanie Liggett finished three spots back of Tracy in the 200 individual medley. In the 50 freestyle, senior SaraJean O’Neill took ninth, while freshman Julia Kay O’Neill was 10th in diving.

In the 100 butterfly, Liggett took fifth and Julia Kay O’Neill 10th, while Schneider earned fourth in the 100 freestyle (with the fifth-best time ever for PHS). In the 500 freestyle, McKelvey added in a fifth-place showing and Emily Doughty was 10th, while the 200 freestyle relay team of the O’Neills, Taryn Bohlman and Schneider took eighth.

Tracy took bronze in the 100 backstroke (she was a bit faster the first day in setting a PHS record time of 1:01.61), followed by sophomore Katie Doughty in seventh and junior Tristan Bohlman in eighth.

“Our strength in the backstroke helped a lot,” Robertson said.

SarahJean O’Neill’s then contributed a fourth-place finish in the 100 breaststroke. (In Friday’s prelims, she posted the fourth-best event time — 1:13.55 — in PHS history.)

By that point, going into the season-ending 400 freestyle relay finals, Powell had all but cemented a second-place finish. But you wouldn’t have known that from the speed with which Liggett, Schneider, McKelvey and Tracy finished.

The state meet was broadcast live over the Internet and Robertson said one commentator was a little surprised the Powell girls weren’t holding back to make sure they didn’t get a disqualification.

“They could have backed off a little bit and played it safe,” Robertson said, but, “I’m glad they still pushed and they still went out there and swam as hard as they could ... because they wanted to improve.”

“I just always have to leave everything in the pool to feel good about a race,” explained Tracy, who thinks that goes for the other girls as well.

Tracy described herself as having sort of a “mini-meltdown” after the relay disqualification, but that’s not how Robertson and the meet’s officials saw it. Robertson said Tracy “had as good an attitude somebody can have after something like that” and at the end of the meet, the officials honored her with a good sportsmanship award.

With Robertson and his wife expecting their first child any day, he was unable to make the trips to conference or state (though he tracked the results closely online and kept in touch).

Robertson thanked his assistant coaches, Stephanie Warren and Fawcett-Kay Bonner, along with Jerry Rodriguez, who lent a hand in the final two meets, for all their help during the season. He also was grateful for the support they and the girls themselves gave them on his decision to stay home.

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