Girls Swimming and Diving: With help from Mother Nature, Middletown looks to end season positively

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                       

The Middletown High School Knights Girls Swimming and Diving team has had a tumultuous regular season to say the least. The Knights struggled to put together consistent results during the regular season and could never seem to be up on the winning side of the score board.

After the Frederick County Swimming and Diving Championships and another middle of the pack finish for the Knights it appeared that the Knights were headed for another lame-duck finish to their season, a trend which had become all too common for the Knights over the past couple of years.

But the Knights decided to pull a Lee Corso on the competition and say “Not so fast, my friend;” during the 1A/2A/3A West Regional meet.

Even though the Knights finished in the middle of the pack (7^th place out of 12 teams) they were in it for the majority of the meet, constantly placing swimmers in the points scoring range and staying within striking distance of the top teams, the Poolesville High School Falcons and the Walkersville High School Lions.

Middletown also qualified swimmers in 9 of the 11 events giving them the ability to have a shot at a state championship, if the swimmers in the 9 events can provide a large amount of quality finishes.

The swimmers in these 9 events will need to up their times by a good margin as based on seed times, most of the swimmers are somewhere between 5-15 seconds off of a state championship pace.

But, in a state championship chopping 5 to 15 seconds off a time is not unheard of at all. In the biggest meets, like this one, the adrenaline starts to flow in large amounts for most swimmers and can push themselves to finishes which they didn’t even think were possible.

The Knights will head into the 2015 Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association 1A/2A/3A State Championship Meet cautiously optimistic, and hopeful that the Knights can win a state championship.

And if there was any year for the Knights to take a state championship, it would be this year after the help the Knights have gotten from Mother Nature.

Due to snow, the state championship meet was pushed back to February 27^th, a day that would have been completely fine if it didn’t interfere with the club swimming state championship for the state of Maryland. A large number of swimmers for the top teams in Maryland will have to miss the meet because the club meets usually get higher priority than high school meets.

This would be where Mother Nature and the Knights gave each other a high-five. The Knights do not have a large number of club swimmers. The majority of the state qualifiers for the Knights are just high school swimmers or put their high school swimming ahead of club swimming as far as priority goes.

To say that that the Knights have a state championship locked up because of this would be extremely foolish and all together inaccurate, but the changes and number of swimmers missing from some of the better teams won’t hurt the Knights, to say the least.

If Middletown can get a large number of good finishes from those swimmers who are there the Knights could possibly sneak into the top 5 in the state championship and push towards a state championship.

Even, if the Knights don’t win a state championship the Knights, with a little help form Mother Nature and a little positivity can provide a good end to what’s been an up-and-down season.