This weekend 50 athletes traveled to Shenandoah, Texas to compete at their first Prelim/Final meet of the season! With only 50 athletes Nitro took 2nd place by 7 points!! A huge accomplishment for the 50 kids that represented Nitro throughout the weekend.
We started off Friday night with Distance events. Michelle Taylor and Kaylee Wu (new TAGS time) started us off in the 800 Free, followed by Jack Ritter achieving his STAGS time! Not to be beat out by the 12&Us swimming the 400 Free. Lyla Lusk, Norah Harkin, Rachel Seal, Aubrey McLaughlin, Hannah Seal, Allie Dunn, Wenchan Xue, and Olivia Pena busted out a total of 65 seconds of time drops to go 100% best times. The 12&U boys followed up with Ben Liang taking 1st place, and Kyle Lee, Dane Mason, Casey Wei, Justin Shi, Joseph Zhang, Philippe Diaz, Aaron Li, Logan Schaefer, Hayden Scarborough, and Alex Wong dropping a total of 87 seconds.
We ended up having almost every single kid make a final by Sunday night! Allie Dunn was the only brave soul to race the 200 Fly in Prelims and Finals dropping her time to a 2:56. We had Lyla Lusk and Cate Palmer swim the 100 Fly to follow up the 200s and dropped over 7 seconds combined. Nice job from Ben Liang to follow with his TAGS cut. Swimmers like Philippe Diaz shone through in the free style events, Catherine McCluskey tackled the backstroke ones, and Addy Dowdy raced to a whole new level of competition in all 4 strokes. Steven Ma finished out Sunday night racing some of the best competition in the state and finishing with his 100 Breast at a 1:18. Overall, the sportsmanship and cheering were the best parts. Big shout out to Elise Nguyen for being the best cheerleader this weekend and helping all of her team mates.
Thank you to the parents, and for those of you helped time, you rock! The kids ended the session with all signing a Thank You note to the Woodlands parents, volunteers, coaches, and swimmers thanking them for their hard work putting the meet together.