Sports: East Lyme’s Ryan Huang is The Day’s 2021 All-Area Swimmer of the Year
Junior Ryan Huang finishes 4-for-4 in virtual ECC meet to highlight COVID-altered championship season
It was March 27, the day of the Eastern Connecticut Conference swimming and diving championship. It was to be a virtual event, with each team competing separately and no team scores kept. And yet, considering what the team had been through in the past year, with the 2020 state championship canceled due to COVID-19 and all of the zigging and zagging that had to be done to complete the 2021 season in accordance with COVID-19 protocols, East Lyme High School coach Rob Bouchey's impassioned speech prior to the meet left him a little bit teary.
"In a nutshell, he was talking about he was really proud of us because of (how we handled) COVID and the things that had come from COVID," East Lyme junior Ryan Huang said. "I could tell under the masks, everyone under the masks was determined to make that happen.
"I think I gave it my all."
Huang won the 100-yard freestyle (49.29 seconds) and the 100-yard backstroke (56.02), as well as contributing to a pair of winning relay teams as East Lyme dominated the competition by taking first place in 10 of the 12 events.
Huang led off the Vikings' 200 medley relay team by swimming the backstroke leg, joining Jay Lin, Hawken Hammen and Eric Wang to finish in 1:40.32, missing the school record by .03. He closed the meet by anchoring the 400 free relay team to a win in 3:31.16, following teammates Lin, Powall Wang and Brendan Fant.
Huang was named The Day's 2021 All-Area Swimmer of the Year.
"The neat thing about him is he's really bright, he's really focused, he's really studious," Bouchey said in describing Huang. "I like to put a lot of responsibility on the boys.
"... Ryan is the silent heartbeat of our training. He always gives the effort that is described in the workout. Just by his commitment to everything I ask, it drives the group. He's the catalyst of our recent success, for sure."
Huang won the ECC's 100 backstroke title last year, as well, and swam a leg of East Lyme's winning 200 medley relay. The Vikings finished the regular season unbeaten at 10-0-1 and won the league championship meet. Huang was second in the 100 backstroke and third in the 100 butterfly as a freshman.
This season, after a weird offseason in which Huang and his friends would try to make reservations at either the East Lyme Aquatic and Fitness Center or the Old Saybrook YMCA to swim in a socially distanced manner, Huang credits Bouchey for keeping things on an even plane, designing workouts that scattered the high school swimmers all around the pool. Bouchey printed the workout regimen and placed a copy at various locations so that the team members could follow along from their various outposts.
"I thought it was a pretty good year given all the circumstances," Huang said. "I could name a whole list of things that could be better, but if you compare the list of things we have that other people have, I feel pretty grateful.
"There's the team, of course. Almost everybody on the team was on it last year. And the coaches had such a great way of handling practices. The way practices were was phenomenal . ... Rob is the guy. He's up there. Everybody on the team has this respect for Rob."
By the time the day of the ECC meet came, Bouchey, who had been determined that his team wasn't going to be the reason anything got shut down this season due to COVID, admits he let his emotions get the better of him.
"It's been a hard year for everybody for a lot of reasons," Bouchey said. "From last year when the state meet got canceled, the magnitude of what we've experienced the last 13 months ... the day we were able to get the pool back open in late June ... just so many people longing for something that felt normal.
"It was challenging to run a workout the way that we're used to but the kids always worked hard and respected the opportunities they were afforded. It was really moving to me."
Huang would like to swim in college, but above all else he will look for a place he can major in computer science, a topic he's been interested in since elementary school when "you told a little character on the screen how to move around."
At the beginning of last year, Huang was part of a team from the high school which took third place at the Lockheed Martin Cyberquest Competition in Stratford, which challenged the teams' computer hacking skills.
He runs, bikes and competes in club swimming with the same group of friends, which he says carries over to the camaraderie of the high school team.
"It certainly didn't have the same air as when you see the other team walking out of the locker room," Huang said of this season. "But to be able to have some sense of competition, the meets definitely have that electricity in them. When you're swimming your good event or we were getting very, very close to the school and pool record for the 200 medley relay, those ones feel very important."
"He's a good match of hard work and talent," Bouchey said of Huang. "That's when you get a special one. He kind of is a really well-balanced, high-achieving person. It gives me a lot of hope to be interacting with him. For him to keep up everything he does, a high level of athletics and he's involved in all kinds of other projects and clubs, science and computers and robotics, it's just really cool."