Several individuals swam personal bests in Thursday’s Columbus North Sectional preliminaries, and the North boys put themselves in position to advance to state in at least three events.
North’s Angel Torres Martinez swam the fastest-qualifying time in the 50-yard freestyle with 22.40-second clocking. Torres Martinez looks to improve on that time in Saturday’s finals.
“In prelims, I pretty much set myself up so I could come back Saturday and do my best,” Torres Martinez said. “We’ve been dropping a lot of times lately, and we are setting ourselves up to go even faster Saturday.”
North’s Evan Patterson tied with East Central’s Jacob Weber for the top time the 100 freestyle at 48.74. Patterson also swam the top qualifying time in the 200 freestyle relay at 1:31.58.
“It’s going to be an exciting meet Saturday, and we look forward to championships,” North coach Logan Schaefer said. “We had a lot of best swims tonight and we look to capitalize on that even more with final swims and the finals atmosphere here on Saturday.”
Columbus East made the finals in all three relays. The Olympians are sixth in the 200 medley relay (1:51.83) and 200 freestyle relay (1:40.02) and seventh in the 400 freestyle (3:42.83).
East placed several individual swimmers in the consolation finals for Saturday.
“We had a lot of PRs,” East coach Dave Fribley said. “We have a lot of kids coming back. It is hard for a lot of schools to get swimmers in the finals because the sectional competition here is so tough. I wasn’t sure coming in what was going to happen because we’ve been up and down all year long, but we were ready to go and we swam well.”
Trinity Lutheran’s Matthew Stuckwisch will be swimming in the finals after swimming the sixth-best time in the 50 freestyle (22.92).
Diving preliminaries begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, and swimming finals and consolations start at 1 p.m. Diving finals will be within the swimming finals and consolations, and the top four divers advance to Tuesday’s Bloomington North Diving Regional.
Sectional champions in each swimming event, plus any others achieving state-cut times advance to next weekend’s state meet. If that totals less than 32 swimmers in an event, the next-best times are added to reach a field of 32.
