New Year, New Rival

Our Winter Training Camp is now in the rear view mirror. Trinity has been back in session for just over a week and we traveled by bus to Houston on Saturday, January 14th, to compete in a dual meet with Centenary College of Louisiana.

I loved the match up. Centenary is transitioning from NCAA DI to DIII, and will be joining the SCAC next year. They still have a couple of classes with swimmers on athletic scholarships, so they were tough. Great competition for our kids - it was fun!

FR Lydia Jones

The women's meet was close and with diving we'd have scored some big points. Centenary doesn't dive, so our board bouncers stayed in San Antonio and competed with State University of New York at Fredonia. Centenary opened and closed the meet with relay wins, which provided them with more than enough points to win the meet. Our women chased a close 200 medley relay loss with wins in the 1000 freestyle (Melanie Gustafson with a 10:54.43), the 200 freestyle (Lydia Jones with a 1:58.50), the 100 backstroke (Jennifer Ince with a 1:02.04), and the 100 breaststroke (Kelly Holton with a  1:11.24). Centenary then took three in a row before Sarah Miller captured the 500. Leslie Butts finished a close runner-up in the 100 butterfly and then Melanie Gustafson collected her second win in the 200 IM. The 400 freestyle relay was all Centenary, and the ladies from Louisiana captured a 131.5 to 115.5 win.

The men's meet wasn't as close and Centenary took both relays, but we kept things interesting with our fair share of individual wins. Andrew Battles was first in the 200 freestyle (1:48.59), Alex Miranda and Lucas Belury went 1 - 2 in the 200 butterfly, Battles fought his way to a 200 backstroke win (2:00.23), and Miranda got his "double" with a 4:53.21 500 freestyle, and Lucas Belury finished up the men's individual events with a 10:07.37 win in the 1000. While the score was 156 to 103, our guys won 5 of 12 individual races and most of our losses were to seniors on scholarships.

All in all, a pretty good day at the pool. Take-out pizza for the bus trip home helped improve our TU campus arrival time. we're now a little less than four weeks out of our conference championships.

BE A TIGER!!

-JR