About 70 percent of all the swimmers swam a season high or lifetime best time at the Cuesta Invitational on March 6-8.

The Cuesta swim coach has not yet posted the results of the invitational, but the team knows they had an individual victory.

“We weren’t in the top ten, which is okay,” swim coach Corey Stanbury said.

Candice Smith, sophomore swimmer swam her unshaved lifetime best of 5min. 50sec. for the 500 meter.

“Candice did really well; she dropped 16 seconds off her best time,” sophomore Erica Shaw said.

Paul Henry, Andy Harmatz, and Shon Page were other standout swimmers that swam their best times.

“All of the individual swimmers, all of us, had our best times, we were beating life times and season times,” freshman long-distance and freestyle swimmer Jeff Craver said.

The swimmers train and compete in meets unshaved which means they do not shave their entire body which adds more resistance to their training.

“Corey has it setup that way to train and compete unshaved until the conference, then we shave,” Craver said.

Overall, the team was surprised at how well individuals like Shaw did; she swam her lifetime best for the 100 meter backstroke.

“Corey was proud that we were dropping times like flies,” said one swimmer.

Javier dropped four seconds off his 200 meter and 100 meter breast strokes.

“The point is that we are training really hard but we’re still swimming faster which is a good sign,” Shaw said.

The team will have to demonstrate its achievements in today’s meet in Pasadena.

“We have an advantage to win the meet,” Stanbury said.

The ECC swim team has an advantage with the long-distance swimmers as well as with their backstroke swimmer like Shaw.

On the other hand, Pasadena has an advantage in the butterfly swim.

“It will be interesting since the teams are kind of even,” Craver said, “also just to see how much [time] we’ll drop from Cuesta.”

Another advantage ECC has is their dive team, since Pasadena is without one this season.

“The team did phenomenal,” dive coach Laurie Dawdy said.

The team is young and still learning, like first time diver Kelly Turner.

“He just went above and beyond and places don’t show it since he is a beginner,” Dawdy said.

Another freshman diver is Jose Bahena, who has had experience diving for his high school team.

“We did really well [at Cuesta], I competed in two dives off the one meter board,” Bahena said.

The only senior diver, David Austin, also did well at Cuesta falling only 3 points short of first place and has been named dive captain.

This past Tuesday, Brill Hernandez participated in practice for the first time since his shoulder injury.

Although there is no Pasadena dive team in the meet today, the divers are not without competition.

“My biggest competitors are Pedro and David,” Bahena said.

The points received for dives in meets go toward the swimming total, since diving is seen more as a subcategory of the swim team.

“It really is different than swimming,” Dawdy said.

An unexpected competitor discovered at the Cuesta Invitational was Santa Monica City College.

The team taped the invitational in hopes of being able to see their errors and fix them.

“I’m proud of my [them],” Dawdy said.