Restoring Balance: A-Meet at Lee-Graham

Red, White, and Blue theme. Go America! And I love the
Stop Sign costume, whoever that is, but where is your blue? 

One of the things that has always bothered me about the Star Wars saga is the prophecy fulfilled by Anakin Skywaker (i.e. Darth Vader.... and sorry, not sorry, if this is a spoiler for anyone, but you had your chance to watch the movies by now). If you are not familiar, Anakin had a wicked high amount of Force Juice (that's not actually what they called it, but you get the idea) and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were stoked because the prophecy said that he would "restore balance to the Force." Restoring balance is all well and good in some situations, but my big issue here is that everyone in the known universe at that time was a good guy Jedi. There were no known Siths or other bad guys around. So, what type of balance were Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon trying to restore? If everyone you know is good, then logically, wouldn't balance add some bad karma? Apparently, yes. That's exactly what they got as Vader brought a whole lot of bad and balanced things out. The moral of the story is to be careful what you wish for. I love Star Wars, but that was a bad call by the Jedi. Balance is good, but if you're running on all cylinders, no need to change anything.

Warning: All Dolphins beware, dangerous Gators lurking. 

Which brings us to the Gator swim team. I feel comfortable talking more openly about it now... I was a bit blindsided (and surprised) by the magnitude of our defeat in Week 1. Wins and losses happen, but I was not prepared to lose by 50 points. After talking to a few other Gator parents around the pool (and the pond), I think I'm not alone. The Hippos took it to us. It's not that High Point dominated us with their times across the board, but the way our two teams matched up at different events and age groups just so happened to result in a "bad beat" for us where the final score looked worse than it really was. As an example of what I mean, if you recall last week's A meet blog, we actually had more clean sweeps than they did (5-3) which is kind of a big deal, yet still came up so short in the final score. That's a bit irregular. And so, THIS, my dear readers, is the time and place where we would want to restore balance (take a note, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan). And restore balance is exactly what the Gators did on Saturday at Lee-Graham. All seems right in the Gator swim universe again.

Record breaking start. 

The Gators came out of the gate quickly, winning the Freestyle events 50-40, and never looked back. Progressively, the Gators won Back (46-44), dominated Breast (59-31), and finished the individual events strongly by winning Fly (54-36). The Gators also prevailed in the Relays (7-5), completing a "meet clean sweep" by winning each event. The final meet score was 244-176.

Individually, the Gators had some wonderful performances. First and foremost, three new MVP individual records were set. Donovan Kovalsky continued his assault on the record books improving upon his records in both the 11-12 Free and Fly (I did tell you this would be a recurring theme...). And John French added to the worklist of the "record-board-updater person" by finishing the 13-14 Backstroke in 31.68 seconds to take over the Gator record from Clark Bayer (who set it last year).

Putting together one Heck of a swim. 

A few other Gators had exceptional swims to outperform a few of their race competitors and add extra points to the team total. Juliette Fore set a personal best time in the 13-14 Free to upset the Lee-Graham swimmers and steal a point in that race. Sheridan Phalen cut 0.25 seconds off of her 15-18 Free time to earn a close victory. TJ Heck dropped a bomb on the rest of the competitors in the 15-18 Breast by finishing 1.50 seconds faster than his previous best and leapfrogging over a crowd of Dolphins to finish in 2nd place. And lastly, in our "Race of the Week" Taylor Makin finished 0.28 seconds better than her previous best to beat the higher seeded L-G swimmer by 0.11 seconds and steal a huge victory in the 15-18 Breast.

Our "Age Group of the Week" was the 11-12 Boys who earned 36 out of a possible 41 points- 88%!! They won every race they participated in, had one clean sweep, and two 1st-2nd finishes (i.e. "almost clean sweeps"). Solid work boys.

Leadership. Guidance. Our Gator version of L-G.

As I mentioned in the scoring summary paragraph earlier, the Gators collectively dominated in Breaststroke earning 59/90 points and producing our "Stroke of the Week." The "Race of the Week" AND three of the five Gator clean sweeps on the day all came out of the Breast events (8 & Under Girls, 11-12 Boys, and 13-14 Boys). FYI, the other two sweeps were the 9-10 Boys Back and the 15-18 Girls Fly.

All in all, it was a good trip to Falls Church. Nice swimming Gators. Nice cheering parents. Nice officiating officials.

Looking forward, don't be fooled by the moderately unbalanced scores that we've seen in the first two weeks. As I said earlier, we didn't match up well against High Point, and we swam really well against Lee-Graham. The next two weeks, home meets against Hunt Valley and Hunter Mill, promise to be extremely tight meets that possibly won't be decided until the final relay races. Be ready to swim fast and cheer hard. Go Gators!

Full results are on the Gator Website here. And photos from the meet are here.

Butterfly pictures make the best pictures.