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Thursday, September 02, 2010
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| | Email this article • Print this article | After splashing past Fridley, Chisago Lakes has good showing at True Team
BY JEFF NORTON
Sports editor
As the season begins to wind down for the Chisago Lakes girls swimming and diving teams, their performances are starting to reach their peak.
Their performance against Fridley and in the True Team solidified the girls and their season standing.
Chisago Lakes 102, Fridley 84
Although the meet went down to the wire, the Wildcats were in command for most of the later part of the meet.
In the early stages of the meet, Fridley looked to have a solid chance at downing the Wildcats, as they jumped out to a 26-20 lead. But, in the 50-yard freestyle, the 'Cats earned their first first place of the day. Heidi Willhite scored big points with a 26.54 in the race, and Araya Gamble came through in second with a 28.26 to tie the meet up at 31.
Fridley started slowly creeping back into the lead until a Willhite-led group finished one, two, three in the 100-yard freestyle.
Willhite came in first place with a time of 58.53, Hannah Lee finished in second place with a 1:02.18 and Rishawn Radziwill came in at 1:02.73 in third place.
Brogan Lee continued her conference dominance in the 500-yard freestyle, as she was more than a minute in front of her closest competitor with a time of 5:23.06, which broke her own school record in the race.
Gamble, Hannah Lee, Brogan Lee and Willhite then got the first relay gold for the girls, winning the 200-yard freestyle in a time of 1:51.44.
Amanda Bean continued her solid season with a first place finish in the 100-yard backstroke, and the Lee sisters, Willhite and Bean closed out the meet with a first place finish in the 400-yard freestyle relay.
The 'Cats won the conference meet 102-84.
True Team Meet
With two of the top teams in the state, Monticello and Big Lake, in the picture, Chisago Lakes was basically in a battle for third place. "I thought it'd be really close between us and Princeton for third place, but we ended up beating them pretty easily," Head Coach Ed Wakefield said. "We thought third was up for grabs, and we ran away with it."
The first swimmer to earn high honors was Brogan Lee. She finished in 2:24.14 in the 200-yard individual medley, which put her in second place and earned the Wildcats 23 points.
Alex Thomsen came through huge in the diving portion of the event, winning it outright with 310.40 points, 15 points ahead of the second place competitor. The win gave Thomsen and the Wildcats a critical 24 points.
Freshman Cassie Schlegel also got big points in diving, finishing in fifth place with a 249.50, good for 20 team points for the 'Cats.
Willhite earned a big 22 points by finishing in third place in the 100-yard freestyle. Her time was 58.95, and it just edged out a Monticello competitor by three-one-hundreths of a second.
In the 500-yard freestyle, a competition that Brogan Lee has owned all year, she finished in third place. But, it wasn't anything she did wrong, Monticello just has two swimmers, including one freshman, who swims at the same clip Brogan does.
The Magic freshman won the race with a 5:23.15, and Brogan finished in third place in 5:27.43, just 15-hundreths of a second away from second place. The third place finish still earned the Wildcats a big 22 points, however.
In the relay events, Coach Wakefield mixed up his teams a little to provide more depth.
Since the scoring system left it open for not much difference between places in the relay events like there normally is, the mix-up work, as Wakefield had four relay teams medal in the top eight and score some huge points for the Wildcats that they may have missed on if not for the scramble.
"I think this really helped our team point total, and it also made for a lot more of our girls winning medals," Wakefield noted. "It's pretty neat to have so many kids win medals."
The Monticello Magic ran away with the event, as expected, with 1,131.5 points.
Right in line with Wakefield's prediction, the Big Lake Hornets finished in second place with a team total of 948 points. And in third place was the Wildcats, who finished with 839 points total points.
Princeton finished fourth with 681.5 points, and the Becker Bulldogs at 474, and the Ogilvie Lions at 231 rounded out the six teams at the meet.
The true team meet is a big indicator of a team's depth in their ranks, and the Wildcats proved that they more than belong with such a young team, but still a boatload of potential and talent.
The girls have an extended break before they are back in the pool against the Princeton Tigers at home on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Two days later, they finish out their regular season schedule by traveling to Hosterman Middle School for a showdown with Robbinsdale Cooper.
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