Mridula Muthukumaran
ST. LEON — Columbus North junior Mridula Muthukumaran put herself in position for a return trip to state by swimming the fastest qualifying time in the preliminaries of the 200-yard individual medley Thursday at the East Central Sectional.
Muthukumaran’s time of 2 minutes, 16.27 seconds is 69-hundreths of a second faster than Bloomington South’s Emily Wang. Muthukumaran also qualified for Saturday’s sectional finals with the fourth-fastest time in the 100 butterfly (1:10.44).
North’s Cora Tregoning qualified third in the 200 freestyle (2:03.27) and fourth in the 500 freestyle (5:36.69), and Caroline Crawford qualified sixth in the 100 backstroke (1:07.44). The Bull Frogs qualified fourth in the 200 freestyle relay (1:51.81), fifth in the 200 medley relay (2:00.94) and sixth in the 400 freestyle relay (4:09.64).
The top eight in each event from the prelims qualified for Saturday’s finals, while ninth-through-16th in each event qualified for the consolation finals.
Columbus East’s lone entrant, Baylee Benefield, saw her season come to an end with a 21st in the 100 backstroke (1:18.84) and a 22nd in the 200 freestyle (2:29.04).
The finals and consolations start at 1 p.m. Saturday at East Central. Only the winners of each event from each of the state’s 20 sectional sites and others meeting the state standard automatically qualify for state. If an event still has less than 32 entrants, the next-best times are added to reach 32.
