BLUE STREAKS EXCEL OUT OF THEIR COMFORT ZONE
Diver Felicity Ryan meets state qualifying dive mark Wednesday
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » Sporting a 2-1 record heading into the first home meet of the year Saratoga Springs girls swimming coach Josh Muldner wanted to challenge his swimmers against visiting Shaker and take them out of their competition comfort zones.
His swimming squad learned that sometimes coach is right.
By throwing his girls into the deep end of the proverbial pool, the Blue Streaks swam away with a 100-84 Suburban Council victory and saw his athletes eyes open to what they are capable of.
“Senior Julia Hawthorne, she doesn’t really swim the IM (individual medley), so I made her do it today, just to challenge her and make her extend herself a little bit and I think she did a great job,” Josh Muldner said.
Hawthorne finished second behind Shaker’s Emily Yu in two minutes, 30.62 seconds, reaching the qualifying standard for the Section 2 meet.
“Freshman Rachel Love usually does the distance
events, she’s done the 200and the 500-, we needed her to do it, so I put her in the sprint events, 50-free and the 100-free and she was a double winner,” Muldner said. “Kayla LaHart had a good 500-, first time doing it for the season, made the Section 2 cut.
“Ellie Baird hadn’t done the breast stroke in a year, went 1:16, that’s a really good time for someone who doesn’t swim the breast stroke.”
Muldner also challenged one of his newest swimmers, junior transfer Emma Kelly from Florida who has been very comfortable as a sprinter; he also threw her in the proverbial deep end of the pool Wednesday.
“I’m like ‘You’re trying to kill me, that’s fine,’” Emma Kelly said. “I thought it was going to be way worse than it was. The last time swam 500 as a freshman, swam 6:15, sprinted the first 50-(yards) and then didn’t know what to do. This was different than that, thankfully.” It was just a bit different. Kelly not only captured both the 200-yard freestyle in 2:04.82 and the 500-freestyle in 5:44.38, but she lapped the field during the 20-lap event and beat second-place teammate Kayla LaHart by more than 37 seconds.
“I thought I was going really slow and then I saw my lap time and I thought ‘O.K. that’s fun,’” Kelly said. “At first I was like ‘Oh, 5:44 because my best time is a 5:33 from a long time ago and then I realized that I hadn’t swam in so long and I thought I was going to go six minutes.
“I was happy with it and surprised and then I realized that I had lapped some people, ‘Oh, O.K.’ and then I wanted to cheer everyone in going to the wall.”
“Her sprinting is there, I want to extend her a little bit so that she’s strong in the 100-, stronger in the backstroke 100- so to do that is to swim the longer distances, two wins, good times, best times she had in over a year,” Muldner said.
While Muldner changed things up, some things stayed the same as senior diver Felicity Ryan reached the New York State meet mark during the 11-dive competition going on during the dual meet at the Skidmore College pool. She finished with 454.90 points, easily surpassing the 440 qualifying mark set for the state meet.
“I felt that it was a little more of a stretch today because we’ve never done 11 dives at a dual meet before, so its definitely faster paced than our normal 11 dive meets, which is something that we all had to adapt to,” Felicity Ryan said. “Normally we have time to sit on our towels, put in our ear buds, drink water, eat food between each drive, whereas this is you’re staying up, you’re drying off in between because you are going to be going next.”
She also doesn’t make a habit of looking at her scores, but found out that she was at 408 points after 10 dives, making her 11th dive count for the state qualifying mark.
“I usually choose not to look at the scoreboard, but my eyes had peered over there so I knew and I know that my last dive was back one and a-half summersault with a half-twist and that is a dive that I’ve been very comfortable with for the past few seasons,” Ryan said. “I felt confident but in the moment you never know what’s going to happen, so I just tried to not let any numbers get in my head and just focused on doing the dive well.”
With the state qualifying mark in hand she’s not about to hang back and wait for the November meet to come to her.
“It’s a nice feeling knowing that I’ve hit that mark so I don’t really have to work on being perfect in all of my dives in practice, it’s less fine tuning and more increasing the difficulty and doing more daring dives,” Ryan said.