While the warriors may not have come out on top at the Cuesta Invite, Coach Corey Stanbury has no doubt in his mind that the swim team is splashing its way on course to a successful outcome at the conference meet.
Some standout performances included Amy Tran, who took 15th in the woman’s 3-meter, while the Men’s 800-yard freestyle relay which was held during the second session of the invite on Friday gave the team 8 points with Noah Rubke, Vincent Fiamengo, Brandon Gregory, and James Baeza, swimming 1:57.68, 2:02.22, 2:00.05, and 2:06.31 for their splits, respectively, receiving a total time of 8:06.26.
Over the span of two days of competing, Out of 20 teams, El Camino took 19th overall, a disputable claim seeing that not all results, including Tran’s scored diving points, have yet to be accounted for.
“I was more than satisfied with the team’s performances; we had more than 30 life time best performances or seasonal best performances over the course of the two days,” Stanbury said.
The team’s next meet will be at home against Chaffey College, the Warrior’s long time rivals. Stanbury expects a meet of close races, expecting times between the opponents to be extremely close, even tenths of a second apart.
“My goal in going up to Cuesta was to have a real good team bonding experience and to see how well we could swim in spite of doing my level best to make them exhausted. For us to have 50% of our swims to have season best times, I’m pleased,” Stanbury said.
Rubke took a seasonal best in the 100-yard backstroke with a time of 2:15.50, taking 21st out of 36 competitors.
“I think Corey does expect a little more from us but he was still pleased and he understands all the time we’ve been putting in this year,” Rubke said. “I think we’re in a good place as a team as we start to change our training focus.”
The one person Corey felt had the best meet out of anyone was Camille Hove, who swam three lifetime bests, which included her 500-yard freestyle, her 200-yard freestyle and the 100-yard freestyle.
“(Hove) is not one of our top swimmers on the team, but that is awesome for her,” Stanbury said. “Her training is really starting to show.”
While Laurie Dawdy has yet to lend a hand to the dive team since her papers have been cleared, the dive team is slowly improving.
“The dive team did pretty well overall considering the quality of divers we were competing against. Most were from Northern California and were very experienced divers,” said Colbert. “Overall he didn’t express any dissatisfaction with us.”
