After a successful swim season, the Aragon swim team placed seventh for varsity boys and girls, and second for junior varsity boys and girls at PALS. At CCS, the Aragon girls finished 35th overall and the Aragon boys finished 36th.
Coach Fred Farley says, “We [took] basically everybody that [we] could down to JV this year and we had some of our seniors swimming varsity. We had a pretty young team, so we moved them all to JV.” Farley continues, “The CCS is one of the top swim leagues in the country so the competition level is very high. There are 140 schools that make up the CCS, with only 78 schools who had athletes who qualified for the swimming championships.”
Farley remarks, “The Aragon swimmers swam great at CCS. Their individual events and relays were mostly all faster than they swam at PALS.” Amidst Aragon’s top CCS finishers, Senior Ivan Chen finished twelfth in the 100m breast stroke and Sophomore Shannon Thielen finished fifteenth in the 100m fly.
Senior Ivan Chen says, “CCS was a great day of racing. I think we performed well as team. There were many incredible breakthrough swims at CCS.” Regarding improvements, Chen says, “I have improved in the 50 and 100 freestyle, 100 breaststroke, and the 50 breaststroke split in the 200 medley relay.”
Freshman Jeffrey Kishiyama recalls, “I improved a lot over the season. I swim mostly backstroke and my time improved by six seconds in a one minute race.”
Freshman Olivia Fong comments, “I didn’t improve at CCS, but I was close.” She continues, “We got to be social and learn about other people. That developed swim meets and competing with others.”
Regarding PALS, Farley reports, “We did well. It always surprises me at the end of the year how people improve since the first couple weeks of practice. They did very well at PALs this year.”
Concerning improvements, Farley states that “their racing ability, their confidence, and their knowing that they can swim” has improved.
Overall, Aragon’s swim season proved to be successful. Chen concludes, “The overall season was a lot of fun. The team got along well and had a blast at swim meets. We had some impressive swims, especially towards the end of the season.”
