Samo swim achieves new records in 2016-2017 season
The Samo swim team had yet another season of victories. Although there were not as many qualifying CIF swimmers compared to their last season, the Samo swim team came extremely close to winning Ocean League and had many swimmers break personal and league records.The varsity team, the boys competing in 4x100m free relay and Colin Casey (’17) who competed in the 100m fly, broke new league records. But varsity was not the only ones to break new league records. Nicola Smulovitz (’20) created a new league records for the 100 freestyle and 100 IM (international medley).Overall, the swimmers, winning many meets and making great memories, felt like it was a successful season, especially thanks to the addition of many younger swimmers. Samo girls varsity swimmer Grace Alexander (’19) is content with the results of this season and believes that they improved tremendously. “Even though we didn’t send a ton of kids to CIF, many [of the] best times were achieved and it was much less stressful than last year,” Alexander said. “All four teams did pretty well at league as well, setting a number of Ocean League records.”Sawyer Koetters (’19) is also proud of the results of the season, such as the records set, CIF and Ocean League. The team looks forward to the future season as they hope to win Ocean League. “There were lots of lifetime records for almost all of our swimmers including myself, and we had a good number of swimmers qualify for CIF Division 2, which is a huge honor,” Koetters said. “While it was disappointing that we lost league by only a few points, it was great to see Colin Casey set an Ocean League record for his 100 meter butterfly.”Matthew Flanders, coach of the swim team, speaks about the times the swim team reached this season. He believes there is room for improvement and prepares to rebuild the team next season when the seniors graduate.“We have a huge senior class, a lot of talented swimmers. We kind of underperformed a bit. We should’ve won all divisions,” Flanders said. Although they bumped up divisions, from three to two, and sent 15 swimmers to the CIF with some even ranking in the top ten, Flanders feels that the team could have done better overall. “We had some people DQ (disqualify) and we had some people not perform well in their races and that was the difference between sweeping all the decisions and not,” Flanders said. Despite this, the Samo team looks forward to more successes next season including sending more swimmers to CIF and winning Ocean League.