Records fall as Westford 3-peats
Last night was all right for record breaking, as a number of meet and state records fell at the Division 1 girls swimming and diving championships at Boston University.
Franklin’s Ashley Loomis shattered two of those marks in impressive fashion. In the rigorous 500-yard freestyle, she broke the 19-year-old meet record by two seconds with a 4:50.76. The Yale-bound senior opened the evening by breaking the meet record in the 200 freestyle with a time of 1:49.0.
“A whole season of hard work and practice paid off,” said Loomis. “I was very excited, especially to do this in my last high school meet.”
Loomis wasn’t the championship meet’s only double winner. Triton junior Maggie Summit claimed the 50 freestyle in a meet record time of 23.39, breaking the four-year-old standard set by Algonquin Olympian Dorian McMenemy. Summit also defended her title in the 100 freestyle with a time of 50.98.
Madison Milbert of Silver Lake also won two titles — the 200 individual medley (2:04.99) and the 100 backstroke (56.21).
Westford Academy took an early lead in the team competition and never let go, cruising to a third straight championship and its sixth in seven years with 445 total points. The North sectional winners placed multiple swimmers in the top six in six of the eight individual events.
“Our depth is our bread and butter,” said Westford coach Caitlin Klick-McHugh. “That’s how we get our points. That total team effort is important. We didn’t win a single individual event today, but we placed two or three in the top of every event.”
The Grey Ghosts even broke a record of their own, shaving 0.08 seconds off their meet mark in the 200 freestyle relay time from last year with a 1:37.40 victory.
Olivia Poulin’s big win in the diving helped Concord-Carlisle finish in a surprise second place. The Patriots edged third place Masconomet by just 0.5 of a point with a score of 166.5. The Patriots also took second in two relays, and Sophia Eckler was second in the 100 breaststroke to Bridgewater-Raynham’s Megan Kramer (1:06.79).
“All season long it has been a total team effort,” said Concord Carlisle coach Matt Goldberg. “We had so many kids work so hard. We worked for every second, every point.”