Lack of divers costs Ramona girls league swim championship
By Joe Naiman
The lack of a Ramona High School diver cost the Bulldogs in this year’s Valley League meet at Del Norte High School, which consisted of May 8 preliminaries and May 10 finals.
Del Norte’s diving points exceeded the five-point margin by which the Nighthawks finished ahead of the second-place Bulldogs.
“The girls made a really strong showing,” said coach Jolyn Yanez. “We were close to being a co-league champion with Del Norte this year.”
Del Norte’s win over Ramona May 2 gave the Nighthawks a 5-0 league dual meet record and the Bulldogs a 4-1 league statistic.
Despite the lack of any divers, Ramona led Del Norte by a single point entering the meet’s final event, the 400-yard freestyle relay. The Ramona quartet of Paulina Bernd, Kaylin vanTol, Jocelyn Schwegler, and Gina Lucas had the fastest time of the preliminary heats at 4:01.38 and improved their time to 3:54.11 in the finals, but that placed second to Del Norte.
“You couldn’t ask much more than that,” Yanez said of her swimmers’ performance.
Lucas won two individual races, swimming for 2:10.91 in the 200-yard individual medley and 1:08.97 in the 100-yard breaststroke. Ashlee Holabird was also a league champion with a time of 1:04.54 in the 100-yard butterfly.
Schwegler’s time of 1:08.96 placed second in the 100-yard backstroke. The 200-yard medley relay team of Schwegler, Bernd, Holabird, and Logan Johnson had a second-place time of 2:03.43. Ramona’s 200-yard freestyle relay team placed third; Lucas, Holabird, Bernd, and Johnson posted a time of 1:50.68.
Three Bulldogs had fifth-place finishes in individual races: Jessi Gilbert had a 200-yard freestyle time of 2:16.13, Bernd set a personal best of 27.30 seconds in the 50-yard freestyle, and Schwegler completed the 500-yard freestyle in 5:54.98. Ramona’s best finish in the 100-yard freestyle was Johnson’s 12th-place time of 1:04.59.
The Bulldog swimmers who fare well enough in Wednesday’s CIF Division II preliminaries will advance to Saturday morning’s CIF finals at Granite Hills High School.