GKAISA City Swim Meet - Day 2

Sunday was the finals of the GKAISA city swim meet. As I mentioned in a previous post, Rachel qualified for the finals in 3 of her 4 events! Her first event of the day was the team medley relay. In the preliminaries on Saturday, they had qualified 13th with a personal best time. Rachel had been the anchor leg, which meant she swam the freestyle portion. After she swam her individual butterfly so well on Saturday, the coach decided to mix it up a little and let Rachel swim the butterfly leg of the relay. That proved to be a good decision as Rachel and her medley relay team finished 11th in the finals and took more time off their personal best! They were only 0.02 seconds away from being 10th! Way to go girls!!!

Rachel's second event was the 25 yard butterfly. She had qualified 12th in the prelims on Saturday with a time of 21.01. Yesterday she swam really well and finished 13th in the finals by swimming 21.12. She had a great race and we're so proud of her!

Rachel's third event was the freestyle relay. On Saturday they qualified 14th. Sunday they swam well, and ended up finishing 15th.

Rachel and her relay teams did such an incredible job this week-end and we're so proud of them! Rachel has been smiling ear to ear since Saturday! I think she really got into the swimming competition this week-end and is excited for next year. It's been a great experience for her to be on the swim team!

Here are some pictures from Sunday at the meet. This is Katelyn showing what being at the swim meet for 2 full days can do to a person!!!
Rachel, Averie, and Katelyn hanging out in the team tent and listening to music.

While we were hanging out and waiting for the next event, we were able to meet a former Tellico Village swim team member. Claire Donahue started swimming with Tellico Village when she was 6 years old. She went on to swim for Lenoir City High School, where she went to state and won in the butterfly! Now she swims at Western Kentucky and already holds several school records. This past year she was the only one on her team that made it to the NCAA championships! She was also invited to the Olympic trials for the last Olympics! Rachel thought it was neat that Claire's favorite and best stroke is the butterfly, since that has become Rachel's best! Here is a picture of the relay team with Claire. It was really sweet of her to take time to talk to them and have her picture made with them.

This is Rachel getting some advice and a pep talk from Coach Rob before her butterfly final.

Here is the scoreboard results after the butterfly. You can see that she finished 5th in her finals, which means she finished 13th overall. Not too bad at all for a first timer!!!