As far as Betsy King knows, she first started taking swimming lessons at 4 years old. She’s been in love with swimming ever since.
King began at Donner Swim Club when she was 6 and started swimming competitively at age 9. The Columbus North junior says she swims on and off year-round.
“I’ll take time off once the high school season ends until I get into Donner season,” King said.
After putting in a good offseason this year, North coach Logan Schaefer believes that King is poised for a possible breakout year.
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“Just an increase in level of focus and discipline to do the things that she needs to do to reach her goal, and she’s doing it consistently,” Schaefer said. “I think that’s the goal for every athlete, but it takes time to learn how to do that. It takes practices, it takes successes, it takes failures, but she has over time learned the things that she needs to do, as well as the things she needs to do to help her team be the best they can be.”
King has qualified for state each of the past two high school seasons. Last year, she made it in the 100-yard freestyle, as well as on the Bull Frogs’ 200 freestyle relay and 400 freestyle relay teams.
For her two-plus years on the North team, King consistently has dropped her times. She says her main motivation on time drops is the idea of maybe swimming collegiately. That helps her set goals to get farther along each time.
“It’s a reflection of the work she has done at practice,” Schaefer said. “Swimming faster for us in practice always leads to swimming faster in meets, and she’s doing that. As long as we continue to move down the trend and continue to push ourselves, I think her times will continue to move down if she wants them to.”
In Thursday’s dual-meet victory against Seymour, King, who mainly is a sprint freestyler, swam a couple “off” events. She won the 200-yard individual medley in 2 minutes, 17.96 seconds and the 100 butterfly in 1:03.19.
King hopes the Bull Frogs can reclaim the sectional title, which they haven’t won since 2015. Bloomington South has won the past three titles.
(Bloomington South) is definitely a big competitor,” King said. “We look forward to swimming against them during conference and in sectional. They’re a really good team, and we know a couple girls there that are pretty good.”
However, King now is focusing her attention to a dual meet against crosstown rival Columbus East, which begins at 5:30 p.m. today.
“Every year, it keeps getting better because we are all so hyped up about it,” King said. “We can’t wait for it because it’s North and East. Every sport is pretty much hyped for that. We all know each other from that team, too, so it’s pretty fun to be able to compete against each other.”
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What: Columbus East vs. Columbus North swimming
When: 5:30 p.m. today
Where: Columbus North High School
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