Finally!

The Spartans finally broke into the win column Thursday night against Maine East. The Varsity won by a score of 94-81, while the JV completed the sweep winning 91-76. We swam some kids in "off" events to take a bit of a break before Winter Break training starts. Even though kids swam in different events, we were real sloppy and had too many dq's and mental lapses. We will definitely be working the next few weeks to shore those issues up. There were some nice surprises and good performances however. Jonothan Roby regained his winning ways on the diving boards with a score 222.65. In the swimming events, there were a few personal bests: Michael Chen (200 free-1:58.63), Bobby Gilbert (IM-2:23.28), John Karalis (IM-2:38.66), Will Asmussen (50 Free-24.42), Kevin Jasiniecki (100 fly-1:07.90), Matt Seanor (100 free-58.48), Dean Karahalios (100 back-1:05.53), Tommy Gilbert (100 Breast-1:05.39), and Michael Stryszowski (100 Breast-1:09.35), too name a few. Check out the rest of the results. Now we head into some tough Winter Break training and then return to school to start the 2nd half of the season.

That was fun!

Sorry I didn't post sooner, I just recovered from a busy weekend. Here are the latest happenings in the pool.

New Trier dual (12/14) - To wrap up the non-conference schedule we decided to travel to Winnetka to take on the defending National Champs. Needless to say it wasn't pretty. We were missing about 8 people on the Varsity level alone, so we were short handed on all levels. We have had a rash of injuries and illness, the likes of which I have never seen. Hopefully, we got this out of our system. Despite getting hammered in the final score, some good performances. Tommy Gilbert finished 2nd in the 200 free & 100 fly (a LTB of 57.9). Here are the results:
Varsity, JV, Freshmen.

GBN Frosh Invite (12/15) - A good day, wish I could've seen it! Bobby Gilbert won the 100 free and was 2nd in the 50 breast and Michael Chen finished 2nd in the 150 free and turned in a nice 23.9 split in the 200 free relay coming out of the 300 free. The newbies finished 4th overall. Check out the results. WAY TO GO FRESHMEN!!!

Midwest Invite (12/15) - While the Freshmen stayed home the Varsity (or at least what was left of them!) traveled to Peoria Richwoods for the Midwest Invite. Turned out to be a pretty long day! We finished 9th, but were without the #1 seed in the 100 free and the #2 seed in the 200 free, as well as taking no divers. Add those in and we are 4th or 5th. The highlight of the day was dinner at Casa de Runkle, which is a sad commentary on how the meet actually went. Nothing wrong with sitting at home eating gondolas and spaghetti from Avanti's. The low light was the 4.5 hour drive home through the blizzard and the the flu. If you want to see the results, click here.

We host Maine East on Thursday at 5:00 PM. Hopefully we can get healthy and back on track!

12 x 25 Free Relay

Probably one of the most fun events of the year is the 12 x 25 relay at the Spartan Sprint Classic. Let's face it, after 10,000 yards a day, a 25 sprint sounds awful good. We've made it a tradition to let the seniors make up the order for the relay. I'm not sure how they figure it out or what the strategy behind it is, but we have a lot of fun with it. It's also hard to get accurate splits. Until we get touchpads at both ends, we have to go off a watch. I was pretty good, only about .2 seconds off the official time. Here are the "names" and splits for our relay on Saturday:
Alien - 10.93
Predator - 11.20
Chatty - 10.97
Robot - 10.53
Ricky Bobby - 11.89
Stoichku - 11.53
DK - 11.49
Karalis - 11.79 (need a name - how 'bout Lefty? Why? Why not!)
#2 - 11.49 (so many names could go here)
Senor Seanor - 11.52
Sunshine - 9.68
Polish Flash - 10.41

GBN Wins JV Sprint Classic!

Every time we go to a meet at St. Charles North, I dread getting a phone call from Vlad after the meet, it just never turns out to be good. Thankfully this year there were no calls, but I did get a little nervous when I saw 2 text messages from Vlad. New year, new form of messaging (yeah, I'm new with the texting), and MUCH BETTER results. We sent a patch work crew over to St. Charles and did they ever STEP UP. We were missing our sick and wounded, guys taking ACT's, and even pulled one guy off the bus to fill in at the Varsity meet. Vlad said it was one of the best TEAM performances he has seen, the guys really got up and supported each other. Lots of hardware won, lots of event champions, lots of lifetime bests. Here are the results.

Spartan Sprint Classic

It's amazing what a difference 16 hours can make on a team. After coming up flat on Friday night, the Varsity guys had an inspired performance on Saturday at the Sprint Classic. Despite having to scramble and make line-up changes due to illness and injury and not scoring any points in diving (even though Jonathan Roby won the event with a score of 403.55, we didn't have a 2nd diver), the Spartans came back to finish 3rd, 1.5 points ahead of Conant. St. Charles North won the meet, followed by GBS. Without question, a much better effort than the previous meet, lots of energy and enthusiasm, and I think we all had a lot of fun. A good point to build from. Too many good performances to mention, so click here for results.

GBS Dual Recap

I wish I could say we had a lot of highlights from this meet, but that just didn't happen for the Spartans on Friday night. Our friends from Glenview swept us on all 3 levels and completely outperformed us. We didn't perform badly, we just didn't step up the way we needed to against a good team. There were some solid efforts, lead by Jonathan Roby setting a new GBN Sophomore record for a 6 dive (dual meet) event with a score of 243.75! The other "highlight" was the effort John Montgomery made on the last leg of the 400 free relay. Interestingly, GBS decided to split their relays and despite being about 12-15 yards behind, John almost pulled all the way back to their B relay, falling about .5 seconds behind. In the long run it didn't matter, as the Titan relay was dq'ed for a take-off, but a great effort just the same. Click for results.

LT Meet Recap

We kicked off the season with a dual against Lyons and the "other" Coach Walker on Friday night. LT is a solid team, with some great guys who can swim fast, especially the guy in the pink suit. If you're gonna wear something like hat, you'd better be good! The Spartans came up on the short end of this clash, but had several good performances for the 1st meet. On the Varsity level, John Montgomery turned in some solid times (1:49.8 in the 200, 49.67 in the 100 - good enough for 1st place), as did Tommy Gilbert (2:05.8/5:02 in IM/500), Brett Heniken (58.9 in Back, just got touched out), and our relays swam well for the first meet. Michael Stryzsowski and Ted Grasso turned in splits that were lifetime bests or pretty close! Jonathan Roby started off the season with a solid 195 point effort, just .60 points behind the winner from LT. I really liked what we saw on the JV level, several event wins and lifetime bests! Leading the way were Will Asmussen, Stephen Ioannou, Tytus Kwiatkowski, Michael Lee, Michael O'Brien, and Ethan Steinberg all turned in solid performances. Check out all the results.

This week features our annual dual with GBS on Friday (5:00 PM @ GBN) and then we will split up on Saturday. We will host the Spartan Sprint Classic on Saturday (9:00 AM diving/1:00 PM swimming), while some of the guys will head to St. Charles North for the JV Sprint Invite at 1:00 PM. GO SPARTANS!