Turkey Splash Swim Meet

Wow! What a weekend! Talk about exciting!

The brouhaha started a little over a month ago when the EAT Turkey swim meet in OKC shut out the three big teams in NE Oklahoma . . . on purpose.

Here's the dealio--Swim Tulsa, Jenks and P66 (Bartlesville) are three huge swim clubs. At big meets, we tend to bring over 300 entrants, especially in the 12 & under age group, this makes the meets last an incredible length of time, especially if the host team only has one 25-yard pool for short course season. We're talking meets lasting from 8 AM until 8 PM, when the official ASA time limit for 12 & unders is supposed to be 4 hours or less. So the host team for the EAT Turkey meet set the cap limit of 300 entrants, which was met by the two big teams in OKC, leaving NE OK in the cold.

So Jenks scrambled.

Jenks is a small town south-west-ish of Tulsa that's been growing rapidly. Their high school now looks like a college campus with an assortment of buildings. A couple of years ago they built a state-of-the-art natatorium--the water and air circulation system was looked at by the Olympic trials people this last summer. It's a wonderful Olympic-sized pool which has bulkheads to make into 2 25-yard pools--which they used at their last HUGE meet, boys on one side, girls on the other side.

And Jenks pulled off a sanctioned tri-team meet in less than a month. GO JENKS!

Since Jenks is a 15-20 minute drive versus a 2+ hour drive, we signed her up for both days, leaving it up to Coach Tony which events to put her in. The meet was open for Seniors, which means any age swimmer could swim and the times were pre-seeded, there were a couple of 45+ year old women swimming. One of the women is in my WW group and she's ranked as the faster freestyler in her age-group, the other lady is an open swimmer who usually swims lakes/ponds, but uses the meets like this to work on her times . . . no, neither one won over the teenagers.

Saturday morning rolls around, the meet doesn't start until 10 AM, but you have to get there early for practice. They were running a 500 Free so it was over 1.5 hours later before the kidlet was in her first event . . . of course, she managed to eat all her snacks during this time.

I don't know what was going on, but something lit a fire under her butt, or it was the three bowls of Capt'n Crunch Peanut Butter cereal.

Saturday:
Event / time / age group placing / qualified for finals / difference from previous time
50 Fly / 36.85 / 7th / missed by +0.4 seconds /-6.17 seconds
100 Free / 1.12.30 / 9th / missed by +1.5 seconds /-5.06 seconds
50 Breast / 43.93 / 8th / missed by +0.6 seconds / -3.33 seconds
50 Free /33.46 / 13th / missed by +0.4 seconds / -0.66 seconds

Sunday:
100 IM / 1:18.79 / 6th / QUALIFIED / -11.84 seconds
100 Fly / 1:22.38 / 6th / QUALIFIED / -11.66 seconds
200 Free / 2:35.33 / 4th / QUALIFIED / -14.11 seconds
*50 Back / 37.5 / 7th / QUALIFIED / -3 seconds

* we left before the official results were posted, and as of this blog, they are not posted on my daughter's swim results list.

All in all, it was a very exciting meet. My only instruction was to try to win her heat. She managed that in almost all her heats, but if she didn't win it was because it was a serious horse race to the end.

I'm very proud of her. She did a wonderful job!

Later, Peeps!