B Meets - Dropping Time

Gator Invasion... If you look hard enough,
you can find a Bluefish in there somewhere. 

Summer swim team always seems to be filled with lots of amazing accomplishments by the kids. New friends are made, new strokes are acquired, and some huge time drops are recorded. One of the places we often see those big time drops are at the B Meets. B Meets, for those who are unaware, are normally held on Monday nights and match us up with the other local Fort Hunt area teams for some camaraderie, a little rivalry, and some fun races. They are also known as "Developmental Meets" since they are focused on the individual swimmers and provide an opportunity for every swimmer to work on improving their times in a couple of strokes.

Butterfly pictures are the best pictures. 

This past Monday the MVP Gators travelled up Fort Hunt Road all the way to Hollin Hills Swim Club, where we were hosted by the Bluefish for our second B Meet of the year. And a fun B Meet it was! Great weather, great sportsmanship, and lots of great time cuts by Gator swimmers. You can view the complete results for this meet (and all the others, too) on the MVP Gator website here, just click on the "Meet Results" for the Hollin Hills B Meet to see the individual results.

A few of those time drops were so big, I think they deserve some extra recognition here. A blog version of the Triple Gator Grunt goes out to these swimmers dropping more than 2 seconds from their previous best times:

• Van Musgrave (8&under) cut 10.92 seconds in the 25 Free AND 9.92 seconds in the 25 Back
• Sean Kovalsky (9-10) cut 4.82 seconds in the 50 Breast
• Hadley Apostol (8&under) cut 4.31 seconds in the 25 Back
• Abigail Leach (9-10) cut 2.87 seconds in the 50 Breast
• Jack Beardsley (8&under) cut 2.71 seconds in the 25 Breast
• Kip Bryant (8&under) cut 2.67 seconds in the 25 Back
• Helen Milito (8&under) cut 2.21 in the 25 Fly

Pre-Swim feelings: 90% excited, 10% nervous

In addition, some special sequencing in the events for this meet  helped quite a few people improve on the Individual Medley (IM) times. Normally IM is the last event of a meet, which means sometimes we run out of time (or daylight) before the event can be held, or swimmers are tired after swimming their other strokes earlier in the meet, or swimmers are just plain tired since its past their bedtimes and they go home before the event is held at all. Whatever the reason, quite a few swimmers posted some excellent times, and excellent improvements, in the 100 IM:

• Brielle Keyes (11-12) cut 6.62 seconds 
• Katya Zaitsev (11-12) cut 5.82 seconds 
• Samantha Cowen (9-10) cut 4.64 seconds
• Matthew Makin (9-10) cut 4.25 seconds 
• Cecilia Morales (13-14) cut 3.81 seconds 
• Gavin Fore (9.10) cut 2.91 seconds 
• Mikayla Gordon (11-12) cut 2.41 seconds 

Nice swimming everyone! (And nice volunteering by all of the parents at the meet, too!)

Full results for the B Meet at Hollin Hills are available here.

All photos from the Hollin Hills B Meet are available here.

Go Gators!

Team Repping is harder than it looks. Honestly.