First Swim Meet 2016

We had our first swim meet of the summer swim season today, and it was an away meet vs. Canyon Springs. For the first time in over 10 years, Natalie is not on the swim team. :( We didn't even sign her up this year. It's just not the same. Our team is much smaller than it has been in recent years, too, and Canyon Springs won the meet pretty handily with 662.50 points vs. our team's 442.50 points.

For a kid who didn't love being on the swim team initially, Eric looks forward to swim practices and did not complain at all about this swim meet. Of course it probably helped that he got to play on the iPad. I volunteered for "Ready Bench" for the first half of the meet, so I took this picture after my volunteering was done and it was Patrick's turn to volunteer as a stroke and turn judge.

We lucked out with the weather. The forecast was for rain, but it turned out to be "only" dark and cloudy for most of the swim meet. The sun came out in the last hour or so, but it didn't get too bad until the swim meet was over.

This is Eric's medley relay team. Eric swam the backstroke (first leg), the boy to his left swam the breaststroke (and got them way ahead of the other team), the next boy to his left swam the freestyle (anchor leg), and his friend and classmate Cameron on the far right swam the butterfly. The other team actually DQ'd, but they were so happy that I'm glad I got to take this picture!

It wasn't all good, though. The reason why Patrick hates being the stroke judge for the second half of swim meets is that they swim the breaststroke and butterfly in the second half, so that's when most of the disqualifications occur. Patrick ended up DQ'ing Eric on his breaststroke because, amongst other problems, he swam most of the stroke underwater. Eric didn't seem upset at all though, and Natalie did give him a few pointers later in the afternoon when Eric went with her and with Alex to the neighborhood pool to swim for fun.

I'm going to detail Eric's race times at this swim meet below, for my own record, with his placement in parentheses:

Event 16--Boys 9-10 25m Freestyle--27.19 sec (11th out of 11)

Event 28--Boys 9-10 25m Backstroke--29.34 sec (8th out of 11 and the three boys from our swim team that placed higher than he did were the three boys that were in the medley relay with him)

Event 46--Boys 9-10 25m Breaststroke--DQ'd along with one other boy with six boys total in the race

Event 66--Boys 9-10 100m Medley Relay--1:45.47

We'll be missing the next meet next Saturday because we will be in Houston celebrating my Dad's 85th birthday.