PJP II senior class boosts swim program
Three swimmers are competing at the District 1-2A championships this weekend.
“It’s been really fun seeing the team grow from our freshman year, just being a couple of us and now all the way up until our senior year, the team’s growing.” – Lindsey Piontek, Pope John Paul II swimming.
Josh Murtaugh has been there from the start of the Pope John Paul II swimming program.
The fact that he will swim at his third District 1 championship meet on Saturday is not lost on the PJP senior.
Four years after no Golden Panthers competed at the championship meet, Murtaugh is one of three PJP individuals competing at the District 1-2A swimming championships at Graham Aquatic Center, York YMCA this weekend.
Murtaugh will race in the 200 IM and 100 breast. Sophomore Henry Phillips will race in the 200 and 500 freestyle, and freshman Haley Lindemuth will race in the 100 free.
“The most striking thing to me is our first year, we didn’t have many meets, we didn’t move on to any championship meets and we couldn’t go to districts or anything,” Murtaugh said. “We have many more meets, chances to move on, chances to compete at championship meets.”
Murtaugh is one of five seniors who have been with the Golden Panthers’ swim program since its first season in 2017-18. That season PJP didn’t officially compete against other PAC schools.
Under head coach Emily Thomas, Jayson Leary and Murtaugh have steadied the boys side for the past four sea
sons while Lindsey Piontek, Kylie McVeigh and Maggie Sullivan have been staltwarts for the PJP girls.
They’ve gone from teams stuggling to fill lineups to the ability to mix and match lineups in their final seasons.
“We were definitely a lot smaller the first year,” McVeigh said. “It was a fight to even get a team. … In eighth grade, we all wanted to swim. We’d been swimming for a long time, so we wanted to start a team.”
“It’s been really fun seeing the team grow just from our freshman year, just being a couple of us and now all the way up until our senior year, the team’s growing,” Piontek added.
All five seniors said they’ve done their fair share of recruiting during their careers at PJP to help build the program up.
Sullivan said she’s gone to open houses at PJP to help spread the word. Murtaugh said he even wrangled some of his buddies from the boys cross country team into the pool.
“As people started talking about it more, people started coming to the meets, they started realizing it’s a lot of work, a lot of effort, it’s a good exercise,” Leary said. “Kids started getting interested in it and inviting friends from teams that were outside of the high school. They started coming and our team slowly started to grow to what it is now.”
Phillips was the program’s first district champion and state qualifier last season, winning the 500 free and finishing third in the 200 free at the District 1-2A championships before the state meet was wiped due to the coronavirus.
Precautions for COVID-19 reduced the district championship field down to the top eight swimmers in each event, but PJP had its most district qualifying times this season. While only three individuals will compete this weekend, the Golden Panthers had five total individuals and a relay teams both qualified for districts.
Freshman Aidan Maiale posted qualifying times inthe 200 free and the 200 free relay team of Murtaugh, Phillips, Maiale and Ciejay Bond was the first PJP relay to ever post a qualifying time for districts.
“I think the thing that happened was just having more kids in the school know about the team,” Murtaugh said. “When freshmen came in, they were more open to swimming. When I was a freshman a junior wasn’t as open to swimming as a new freshman because they only had one more year instead of four more years.”
Murtaugh will be the only member of the the senior class at the District 1 championships this weekend, but it’s fair to say the impact of this senior class will still be felt and for many more years to come.
“We all want to show a good example for the people that are coming ahead,” Piontek said. “We kind of started the team from the bottom and grew it up. We want them to continue what we started.”
Their times in the pool may be over, but PJP’s senior class doesn’t plan on cutting its roots to the program it started any time soon.
“We’re the first seniors to go through all four years,” Sullivan said. “I think we’ll definitely come back.”
COVID-19 vaccine makers told Congress on Tuesday to expect a big jump in the delivery of doses over the coming month, and the companies insist they will be able to provide enough for most Americans to get inoculated by summer.
Vaccinations got off to a rocky start, but by the end of March, Pfizer and Moderna expect to have provided the U.S. government with a total of 220 million vaccine doses, up sharply from the roughly 75 million shipped so far.
“We do believe we’re on track,” Moderna President Stephen Hoge said, outlining ways the company has ramped up production. “We think we’re at a very good spot.”
That is not counting a third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson, that is expected to get a green light from regulators soon. The Biden administration said Tuesday that it expects about 2 million doses of that vaccine to be shipped in the first week, but the company told lawmakers it should provide enough of the single-dose option for 20 million people by the end of March.
Looking to summer,
Pfizer and Moderna expect to complete delivery of 300 million doses each, and J&J aims to provide an additional 100 million doses. That would be more than enough to vaccinate every American adult, the goal set by the Biden administration.
Two other manufacturers, Novavax and AstraZeneca, have vaccines in the pipeline and anticipate adding to those totals.
Asked pointedly if they face shortages of raw materials, equipment or funding that would throw off those schedules, all of the manufacturers expressed confidence that they had enough supplies and had already addressed some of the early bottlenecks in production.
“At this point I can confirm we are not seeing any shortages of raw materials,” said Pfizer’s John Young.
The hearing by a House subcommittee came as U.S. vaccinations continue to accelerate after the sluggish start and recent disruptions caused by winter weather. But state health officials say demand for inoculations still vastly outstrips the limited weekly shipments provided by the federal government.
“The most pressing challenge now is the lack of supply of vaccine doses,” Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, said as she opened the hearing. “Some of the companies here today are still short of the number of doses they promised to initially deliver when they last testified before this subcommittee in July.”
Pfizer and Moderna failed to meet delivery quotas for the initial doses of their vaccines late last year. That has prompted Congress to scrutinize the companies’ plans for vaccine development and delivery, which they noted benefited from $16 billion in federal funding.
“A significant amount of American tax dollars were invested to be able to produce the vaccine immediately upon approval,” said Rep. David McKinley, a West Virginia Republican, who questioned executives on why they were still unable to meet demand for the vaccines.
Nearly 14% of Americans have received at least an initial dose of the twoshot-regimen vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed focused most of its efforts on racing vaccines through research, development and manufacturing. But little planning or funding went to coordinating vaccination campaigns at the state and local levels. That effort is now picking up speed, with plans for mass-vaccination sites and an increasing supply distributed to chain pharmacies.
Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, questioned J&J Vice President Richard Nettles on why the company has fallen behind on the schedule outlined in its federal contract, which included delivering 12 million doses by late February.
Nettles said only that the company has faced “significant challenges” due to its “highly complex” manufacturing process. But he noted the company is partnering with drugmaker Sanofi to further expand production.
“This has been an unprecedented effort to scale up manufacturing for a vaccine against a disease that didn’t even exist more than a year ago,” Nettles told lawmakers.