The Often Underestimated Hippo - A Tale of the High Point Pool A Meet

In the season preview blog post last week, I posed the rhetorical question of, "How fast can a hippo really swim anyway?" Apparently, while the definition of "swimming" can come under question (some scientists say they really are really "running" in the water rather than swimming), they can move pretty darn fast in the water.

And, apparently Hippos are Africa's most lethal animal. Who knew? So much for that prediction.

The Hippos of High Point Pool swam pretty fast. So did the Gators, of course, but we came up a bit short on the scoreboard in our first meet of the season.

Gator Ballet...Part I

As an interesting aside, its probably worth it to review the method of scoring for A Meets since this is the first one of the season. There are 5 age groups, 4 strokes, and both boys and girls. If you do the math there, you'll end up with 40 total individual events. Each individual event has six swimmers, with only the top 3 taking points: 5 points for first, 3 for second, and for third. That yields nine possible points for each individual event, which can all go to one team 9-0 (5+3+1) in a "clean sweep" or get split very closely 5-4 if one team's swimmer ends up 1st, and the other team finishes 2nd and 3rd (5 and 3+1). Ties result in an average of the points, but that's probably more math than we want to get into here.

Gator Ballet Part II...dancing (swimming?) with Hippos.

After the conclusion of the individual events, the meets turn to relays. There are six relays each for boys and girls which are all scored 5-0... five points for the winner and none for the losing team. Most of the relays are Medleys (four swimmers each swimming one stroke: Back, Breast, Fly, Free). The 8 and unders swim a Free Relay (4 swimmers at 25m each) and the final race is a mixed age Free Relay.

The interesting thing with this point system is that while it distributes points fairly, it also gives a strong reward to 1st place. If you think about those 40 events.... If one team always wins (5 points x 40 events) and the other team always gets 2nd and 3rd (4 x 40), then the team with the single winner in every heat would win by a score of 200-160 in the individual events. Any guesses what the score was of the meet after all individual events? 200-160....

We definitely won the costume contest. 

Okay, the Hippos didn't win every event and the Gators didn't come in 2nd and 3rd in every event, but on average, that's how it ended up.  In fact, the Hippos won 24 events and the Gators won 16. And in a mild (and welcome) contradiction to the flow of the meet, the Gators had five clean sweeps (1st, 2nd and 3rd) while the Hippos had three.

In addition to the five clean sweeps, there were several other high points for the Gators in this opening meet.

First, Donovan Kovalsky finished off his own personal clean sweep of the 11-12 year old boys record book by taking the Backstroke in an official event (he broke the record unofficially at the Waynewood B Meet last Monday). His record time of 33.98 bested Cameron Morey's time of 34.21 and removed the last remnants of any other swimmer from the record books at that age. In addition, He lowered his own record in the Free from 27.56 down to 27.24 seconds. (As I mentioned in the last blog post.... keep watching Donovan this year as some amazing things are likely to happen.) The NVSL record for 11-12 Freestyle is 26.44 seconds. With some steady progression, I think (and hope) that mark could be in reach this season. I'll be watching his races very closely all season, as should you.

Too many photogenic Gators in this picture not to post!

Second, the 15-18 year old girls 200m Medley Relay team (Cassidy Bayer, Taylor Makin, Elaina Phalen, and Sheridan Phalen) set a new team record also by winning in a time of 2:06.81. Congrats ladies.

And while not the last high point of the meet (there were many more), the last one I'll single out was a literal point... a point earned in the Backstroke by 6 year old Jackson Saloom, who finished 3rd with a time of 26.88. It's always a great accomplishment when 6 year olds even make it to the A meets, and even more magical when the bring home points for the team! Nice work, Jackson.

On another positive note, three age groups tied for the "Age Group of the Week," all scoring 32 points each (78% of possible points): the 9-10 year old girls, the 11-12 year old boys, and the 13-14 year old boys all dominated their competition. Nice swimming Gators!

And moving on, this week's Swim of the Week goes to Charlie Ruppe, who crushed it in the 13-14 Fly, improving his time by more than a full second and upsetting the higher seeded Hippo swimmer by 0.4 seconds to get the win.

NVSL Sportsmanship at its finest, helping Charlie
to that Swim of the Week, no less.

Next up is a home B Meet with the Hollin Hills Bluefish Monday night. Go Gators, drop those times!

The full results from this week's meet are available on the Gator webpage here. Division standings and results are available on the NVSL webpage here.

All meet photos are now posted here.

You may or may not have yet heard, but Butterfly pictures
make the very best  pictures.