Your Gator Nation Blog: Div Relays Part Deux - The Details, The Records, and the All-Stars!

Caution: Gators in Water

Divisional Relays certainly did not disappoint. If you haven't read the first part of this article from yesterday, you should read here first to get some background and the overall big picture. If you are caught up already, then on to the details!

As in years past, the Gators brought it for the Relays. Below are the teams that finished in the top-3 places (with asterisks identifying the All-Star qualifiers).

First Place Relay Teams
*Boys 11-12 Medley: Alexander North, Jack Dupuis, Matthew Makin, and Donovan Kovalsky
*Boys 13-14 Medley: John French, Charlie Ruppe, James Piland, and Jack Klopson
*Girls 15-18 Medley: Parker Fulghum, Taylor Makin, Elaina Phalen, and Sheridan Phalen
*Boys 11-12 Free: Matthew Makin, Jack Dupuis, Alexander North, and Donovan Kovalsky
*Girls 15-18 Free: Parker Fulghum, Gabrielle Greszler, Juliana Skopp-Cardillo, and Sheridan Phalen

Second Place Teams
Boys 9-10 Medley: Gavin Moore, Shaan Nagda, Samuel Bruce, and Sean Kovalsky

*Boys 9-10 Free: Samuel Bruce, Sean Kovalsky, Gavin Moore, and Joe Mills

Third Place Teams
*Girls 8&U Medley: Karly Whitehead, Alexandra Myers, Natalie Crowther, and Evie Craig
Girls 9-10 Medley: Amelia Adams, Abigail Leach, Ginny Grubbs, and Helen Milito
Girls 11-12 Medley: Lily Palmerino, Abigail Litonjua, Caroline Miller, and Elizabeth Moorman
*Girls 8&U Free: Alexandra Myers, Karly Whitehead, Evie Craig, and Natalie Crowther
*Boys 13-14 Free: James Piland, John French, Joseph Humphreys, and Charlie Ruppe

Relay Team Spirit

As I mentioned yesterday (and its worth saying again) FOUR of those races resulted in new MVP records: both Boys 11-12 races, the 15-18 Girls Free, and the 13-14 Boys Medley. Of note, the 13-14 Boys record had been around since 1991- that's a 27 year old record they broke... older than some of our swim parents here at the pool!

I don't necessarily want to single out one record breaking relay more than any others, but if you like sports, you're going to have to watch the Boys 11-12 Medley race. This thing could be one of those Nike or Gatorade commercials. I was hesitant to highlight this because this is a team event and all the members are contributing well, but there is one individual performance that I feel compelled to draw attention to. It's. Just. So. Good. We've talked here before about how Donovan Kovalsky is having an amazing record breaking season and how we expected records to keep falling week after week. But this one was just silly. You NEED to watch. The MVP team is in lane 6 at the bottom of the screen. And again, Donovan could not have done this without his teammates. In fact, the first three legs were swimming very well and seemed to be solidly in 2nd place behind the Hunt Valley team which was sort of pulling away from the pack. Hunt Valley had opened up a lead of nearly two body lengths on everyone.... and then it happened. Words don't do it justice. You need to watch the race, and focus on that blurry streak zooming across the bottom of your screen in the final leg.

That was nuts, right? Fun to watch. I feel like we need to name this one, sort of like Dwight Clark/Joe Montana and "The Catch" back in 1981 or the Cal/Standford band game in 1982 with "The Play." I hereby dub this one "The Swim." Please refer to it accordingly from now on. And one more tidbit, their final time in that event was 1:04.96 seconds. The old record was 1:04.97. Yes, they broke the old record by a mere 0.01 seconds. Zoom, zoom.

I'm pretty sure he flew all the way across the pool like this
and never actually touched the water. Is that legal?

On the macro level, there are a couple of interesting things from an analytical standpoint about this meet. First, if you've been reading the blog for the past couple years, you're aware that Division 3 is pretty strong. In fact, EVERY single event winner at Divisional Relays was a qualifying All-Star time. Even more, in 19 of the 22 events the 2nd place finisher was also an All-Star time. Quite a few thirds and fourths even made it. And the peak? In the Girls 8 & under Free, 5 out of the 6 teams all qualified for All-Stars. This is the type of talent we're swimming against every week. And I assure you, stuff like this is definitely not normal in all 17 NVSL divisions.

To tell you the truth... some of these start photos are
rivaling the Butterfly photos for "photo supremacy."

The second interesting observation is the number of victories for each team. As a benchmark, last year both MVP and Langley (who is now in Division 1) won 7 events each and accounted for 14 of the 22 victories just between our two teams, with the rest scattered amongst the other 4 teams. This year's meet ended with a very interesting result... which really highlights the parity and evenness of Division 3 this year (if you missed it, you can read about our Division's "Any Given Sunday" level of parity in last week's blog here). If you had any doubts about Division 3's balance they should go away now... because EVERY team in the division won either 4 or 5 races on Wednesday (except Lee-Graham, which had zero). I had to double check the results twice (um, triple-checked?) because it seemed too balanced to be true. But the numbers checked out: that's 5 races won for MVP and Hunt Valley, and 4 wins each for Hunter Mill, Donaldson Run, and High Point. THIS is why every meet this year is constantly up for grabs with no clear favorites.

If you are interested in watching more of the races, they are all available online. It just so happens that SwimNinja decided that the Division 3 Relay Carnival was going to be a great one and made it their "Meet of the Week." As discussed above, they were clearly right about that.

All the races are available here. I'm not going to embed them all, so you'll have to go to the SwimNinja page to watch them. But, I will embed the other three Gator records right here in the blog:

11-12 Boys Free (Lane 4 in the middle):