Academy girls win title the hard way
Eldorado secures boys team crown
Leave it to the Albuquerque Academy girls to find new ways to win a state high school swimming and diving championship.
The Chargers came into the 2023 finals at their own pool having won six straight championships and 21 overall.
Academy added to those totals Saturday by scoring 290 points — and yet not having a single individual or relay winner.
“It’s hard to do,” said Chargers coach John Butcher.
The path to victory was actually laid out during Friday’s preliminaries, he said, when Academy swimmer after Academy swimmer outperformed her seeding and earned a spot in the finals and opportunities to earn points.
“We put such an emphasis on prelims and making sure to position ourselves to be able to make this push on Saturday,” Butcher said. “And (Friday) the girls did their job, and everybody moved up and set themselves up for success. I felt pretty good going into (Saturday) that we would be able to keep that momentum moving.”
It was actually something the team focused on throughout the season.
“This year, a big theme for us was thinking about teamwork and the power of team and swimming for each other,” he said. “The depth of the team and everyone playing their part in that was huge for us.”
The athletes themselves may have had some negative thoughts early, but they quickly rallied, said sophomore Cindy Fan, who helped the 200-yard medley and the 400 freestyle relay teams each take second.
“We had our doubts at first that we would win the entire competition, but this shows that you don’t need stars to still win,” she said. “We were really wanting to win real bad, and I think that helped us win. It means so much to me, seeing all my teammates helping us all win this.”
Eldorado finished with 264 points, led by Francesca Benavidez, who won the 200 free, was runner-up in the 500 and helped the Eagles win the 200 medley relay.
Hope Christian’s Reese Hinnerichs also turned in a strong performance, winning the 200 individual medley and the 100 backstroke.
“It was a great way to finish up my senior year,” said Hinnerichs, who has won seven individual gold medals in her career. “It’s like putting the bow on the present, but also getting to be with all these amazing people. I love my teammates, I love my club teammates that are here. I think that we’re super, superinclusive, and they’re the people I love the most.”
When COVID and health mandates forced high school athletes from their normal training regimes, it gave Eldorado junior distance swimmer Nolan Arnholt a chance to try something new.
So all he did was win the 100-yard freestyle last year.
Returning to his, well, comfort zone this year, Arnholt grabbed both the 500 and 200 free high school state championships Saturday, while also helping the Eagles win the 200 and push Eldorado’s boys to the top of the leaderboard with 275 points, ahead of Academy with 246.5
“My 500 free slipped down as my top event and I picked up the 100 instead,” he said. “Then when I could start training again, the 500 started becoming good again, so I started doing it again.”
An endurance race, Arnholt admitted, is “not my favorite event. It hurts a lot.”
Especially coming down the final 50.
“Whatever you have left, leave it in the pool,” he said. “It hurts a lot, but it’s worth it when you finish.”
The Eagles put a hurting on the rest of the field with the finale, the 400 freestyle relay, when simply finishing in the middle of the pack would have been good enough to clinch the championship, their first since 2018 and fifth overall.
“We haven’t won for a while and we thought we were going to win this year by a lot. But it was actually a lot closer than we thought,” said junior Cole Bettis, who swam the anchor of the championship winning 400 relay. “So it was way more exciting. It was really fun. It was a good meet. It had a lot of ups and downs, but I thought it was a good experience.”
And the final event was the cherry for Bettis, even though he won the 50 free, 100 breast and helped Eagles win the 200 relay.
“I decided we were going to win it,” Bettis said. “I was just gonna win it by a lot and win the state championship. We were confused on what the relays were going to be but we still ended up doing the same relay. I went faster (Friday) than a lot of the other guys did, so that’s probably why our (prelim) time wasn’t faster.”