CIF!!

May 12th was the CIF swim meet for SoCal. Tyaan's 4x100 freestyle relay team had qualified along with several other swimmers from her school. The meet is usually held at the Belmont pool in Long Beach, which is 50 miles from us. But at the last minute we heard that there was some problem there so they moved the meet to Mt. SAC, a jr. college close to home. It's actually where Tyaan is now attending! That was great news and we enjoyed seeing all of the swimmers from schools closer to Long Beach because we knew for once they had to drive a long way instead of us.

It was a long day in the sun. The Southern Section for CIF covers most of California. Central and Southern California, so everyone who qualified for an event was here this day to swim. They swam and the top 16 in each event went on to finals which was held a couple of days later.

Here is Tyaan warming up in the competition pool. She's got great technique, and a beautiful stroke. I always say she's a 'pretty' swimmer.



This is the team getting ready for their race. The 4x100 free relay is the last event so it was later in the afternoon and they'd had a lot of time to be nervous!



You can see Tyaan standing next to her coach here. Chaffey had a pretty good sized group of swimmers qualify this year, so there was usually one of them competing.



Here is their race. They are in lane 6. Tyaan is the first swimmer.




She finished first on her leg. She is so good at pacing herself. A lot of times other swimmers will pull ahead but she never gets rushed by them. She sets her pace and sticks to it and passes the girls who pulled out ahead and burned out. Her teammates mom was timing their splits nearby and you can hear her say "1:01" when Ty finishes her leg of the race. This is her best time ever for a 100 free. It was the best time any of these girls got all season. I was thrilled when I heard she had done so well, and she told me later that she had a bad turn and slipped on the wall.

Here is Tyaan with Coach Brown after the meet. They didn't qualify for the next round, but they were all really happy with how they had done. Her coach called her his "1:01er"!




Here she is with 2 of her 3 teammates in this event. It was the last time they swam together in competition. It was really great that they got to swim at CIF! So Tyaan got her CIF patch to go with all of her letters and her league championship patch. She accomplished a lot as a high school athlete and I am excited for her to go on to college level, but will really miss going to the high school to watch her there.



As always, she did great and made me very proud!