Dixie State University’s women’s swim team made waves by splashing into eighth place at the PSCS Conference Championships Feb. 8-11.
This was a sink or swim meet and DSU Trailblazers swam, finishing out the year strong.
The Trailblazers placed eighth out of 13th at the four-day event and this finishes up the season for the Trailblazers.
“The biggest thing that happens on the first day with a young team and with mostly freshman is getting their feet wet,” head coach Benjamin Rae said. “We took seventh in the 200 medley and eighth in the 800 free relay.”
Rea said the swimmers performed pretty well and that on the first day their nerves were high until they are a few days into the meet.
“All the girls were able to swim in at least one of the races,” Rea said. “Our team had so many freshman swimmers this year just trying to learn this process, swim meets like this are a real grind after a few days in.”
Gracy Kroll, a freshman early child education major from South Jordan, swam her personal best in the 100 butterfly with a time of 59.64 and smashed her 200 backstroke time with a 2:06.53 finishing ninth overall.
“Our 200 freestyle relay team finished sixth, and we came in seated, eighth, giving our team a team record trimming off 1.5 seconds to our overall, which moved us up a couple of spots,” Rea said. “The team hung in there and did pretty good. Friday was a really good test to see where we would be going moving forward in the team rankings and also gave us the opportunity to move up in the rankings.”
The team broke five relay records were broken during the championships.
“The highlight of Friday was our 400 medley relay that was seated 10th going into the meet and we finished eighth,” Rae said.
“Saturday was probably the longest session of the meet, but we did pretty well the morning,” Rae said.”We had 11 swims this morning that made finals.”
“I had a really good season and a good mid-season at Colorado Mesa,” said Freshman Kayla Greer, an undeclared major student from St George. “I wanted to see what I could do with really hard training and it paid off. I knew I was ready for this meet and my training would back me up.”
Greer was really happy with her races and she swam her lifetime bests in both the 100 meter backstroke at 58.75 seconds and 200 meter backstroke at 2:08.31.
“Day four of the meet is super long and super exhausting but, we kinda had a party,” said Price. “I was trying not to be emotional as I am leaving to go on a mission, it was hard to have such an amazing experience and leave. But, I will be back,” said Katrina Price, a freshman psychology major, from Cedar City.
