USN Swimming competes at 2009 State Championship

^{The USN HS swim team took eight swimmers to the Tennessee High School State Championships in Knoxville, TN this weekend.  The meet featured the best high school swimmers in Tennessee across all divisions (public, private, and homeschooled athletes) competing alongside each other.   This year’s meet was the fastest meet in Tennessee history, with 9 State records broken over two days.}

^{Our USN contingent, led by four seniors, represented the school very well.  On Friday, senior Deirdre Jones won her first individual State Championship in the 200 freestyle.  This was a dramatic race that came down to the final 25 yards between four girls, where the lead changed hands several times and Deirdre didn’t take over the lead until the last 10 yards (!).  Her time of 1:50.69 crushed the Automatic All-American time standard.} 

^{On the boys’ side, Michael Ng finished 14th in a very fast 100 butterfly event and dropped half a second from prelims to finals.}

^{Other Friday highlights included McLain Gore winning his 200 IM heat and dropping 5 seconds from the Region meet, and our two strong medley relays (all four of the girls on our medley relay – Deirdre, Elizabeth Johnston, Blaine Brown, and Caroline Graham) swam their fastest splits of the season.  Our boys’ medley relay narrowly missed qualifying for finals, finishing 22nd after being seeded 29th.}

^{On Saturday, Deirdre earned another automatic All-American swim in her 100 freestyle.  After qualifying fourth in the preliminaries, she finished second in the finals, just .06 seconds away from first place.  Her two swims earned her 37 individual points for the meet, which tied for the highest individual point total of the girls’ meet.}

^{Michael’s 100 backstroke was another highlight for us – he finished second in the consolation heat and 10th overall. Michael missed the All-American consideration time standard by only .17 seconds.  Our other backstrokers, McLain and Logan Jones, each swam lifetime bests by over a second each.}

^{The other highlight for us on Saturday was our boys’ 400 freestyle relay – McLain, Logan, Hunter Tulipan and Michael swam one of the most inspired races we’ve had all year long.  Each of them swam their fastest relay split ever, and we finished four seconds faster than we were at the Region meet (and six seconds ahead of last year’s USN team), and just shy of the top 16 after being seeded 30th. Our girls' 400 free relay was also the fastest we've swum all season.}

^{Our four scoring swims earned us 47 points, which was earned us 15th place overall (out of the 106 teams competing at the meet). Among teams from Middle Tennessee, we finished fourth.}