Boys swim and dive did it again.
Once again, as in previous years, a powerful 4×100 relay emerged from the WS Boys Swim Team and shattered a 22-year-old school record.
The the relay of senior Jake Dickens, along with juniors Taylor Whitesel and Connor MacKinnon and freshman Lane Stone, fought through the regular season, conquered their times at the conference and regional meets and finished it off with one last show at the state meet.
The relay started picking up momentum during the regular season, and once post-season hit the pressure really kicked in, culminating in the District meet at Audrey Moore and the Regional meet at Oak Marr.
The conference meet carried the greatest weight, with other relays in regional and state contention.
“My thoughts honestly at districts were to just win because we were top seed and I didn’t want to lose to Woodson,” said junior Connor MacKinnon. “We all were shooting for the state cut. It was all or nothing.”
The pressure continued at the regional meet at Oak Marr, where the boys squared off against the Robinson relay.
“At regionals my thoughts [were] to drop as much time as possible and not let my teammates down. We were swimming next to Robinson and we gave everything we had,” said MacKinnon.
Breaking the relay record came with a massive amount of work. These boys not only swim for the high school team, but also swim long hours each week for club teams, meaning that they often go to two practices a day during the high school season.
Besides the outside work, they also had stiff competition from rival school teams.
Lastly, these boys had to balance school work, along with high school team requirements and club practice; the work all seemed to pay off well for this squad, who initially didn’t even realize they had broken the record.
“At Districts [senior] Jake [Dickens] was anchor of the relay, and when he touched we all leaned over to see the time and we saw we had the state cut. I hadn’t even realized we got the record. Sure enough, we shattered the record and our whole team was going insane,” said MacKinnon.
For Dickens, the sweet end to his high school career came at States.
“At States we huddled up before the race and said that this was our last race of the season and Jake’s last race of his high school career so we had to go all out and make the record untouchable,” said MacKinnon.