Let me start by saying we are super proud of Zoey and her accomplishment this season. She told us post Auburn meet this time last year that she would swim fast enough to make State Qualifications. In all honesty, she qualified for state championship meet for a 10 year old, but sadly, swim is a different sport, and it goes off of your age the day you compete not age at the beginning of the season like other sports. So even though she has qualified as a ten year old this season, she is eleven now, and the biggest time drops in the entire sport is the swim difference between the 10 and 11/12 year old times. This means she did not qualify for any event to go to State Meet. Let’s look at each event Zoey completed this last weekend.

500m Freestyle.

On Friday night, Zoey swam her first long swim in competition. She was very scared and was not confident in this swim. This is normal for a first long swim for any swimmer, and her coach was so happy she finished the entire race and got a time. Her time is not the greatest, but it is good enough for the first time, and I guarantee that it would be minute less if she did it with confidence this time. Her current time is:

8 minutes and 55 seconds

100m Freestyle

Zoey went into this meet with a 100m freestyle time of 1:49. She had last swam in competition the 100m at Memphis a few months ago. Since then, she has greatly improved her dive, which still needs some help and her turns, which are getting better still. She had a rough start to this race and got behind. You can hear me saying “45 again” in the video because lately, her 50m splits have been exactly 45 seconds.  I was hoping for better with a competition sprint. What we got though was a come from behind 2nd place in her heat finish. She might have hit the first turn in last place but she finished the race in second. Her now current 100m time is:

1:34 100m Freestyle time

50m Backstroke

Zoeys’ second swim was the 50m backstroke on Saturday. This was also her best race of the weekend. She took the lead off the jump and never gave it up. She had a little Misscue on the turn, but she fixed herself. This is also the closest she came to a qualifying time. She actually just missed the meet finals swim. In every meet, the best 8 to 24 times swim again in a final for points for the team. Zoey just missed the cutoff to swim that evening in the finals in the 50m backstroke. She had just swam this in a meet less than a month ago with a time of 49 seconds. With a month of practice and a great start her current time is:

45 seconds

100m Backstroke

The funny part about this particular swim as it was the first one of the third day of competition for her is that it was her best chance at a state qualifying time and at the same time was the best improvement time from her last time. Honestly, this swim was off from an hour beforehand. Zoey battles anxiety (wonder where she gets that) and has some confidence issues we have been trying to overcome with mindset training. She did so well the day before that we thought it would continue, but a combination of lack of confidence and fatigue from being on day 3 of this meet got her. Again, this is her best time in this event by a lot, but I believe if she had swam this the night before, she would have had a qualifying time. In the end, it was still a huge improvement over her score from a couple months ago. Her last time was 2:02. Her new current time is:

1:40

50m Freestyle

This was her last event of the meet. She was pretty tired going into this swim but in a much better mindset than the last swim. This dive was better than most of her other dives but needs lots of improvement. Her turn on this one was better than any on her 100m swim. Again she had just swam this event a month ago but scored better in this meet. Her last time was 45 seconds. Her new time is:

44 seconds

Overall, this was a win of a meet because of the improvement she saw in each event. She had never swam all three days, and I saw the exhaustion on her from all the competitive swimming she was doing. She also learned a great lesson on mindset affecting a swim because she knew she had that 100m backstoke time in the bag, and she stressed herself out and had a bad start and slowed herself way to much on the first lap. We will learn and move on from this. We have already started implementing new things into her routine to make her a better swimmer.