The sound of the pistol echoes through the indoor pool arena and the swimmers jump into the water as the first race of the day begins.
By the end of the day, the Jesuit/Ursuline relay team will have taken home a first place finish in the meet hosted by Jesuit. Coach Moyse said that “[he] was very impressed with the way both the Jesuit and Ursuline swimmers competed and was extremely happy with the outcome of the meet.”
The Ursuline and Jesuit team combined to swim a total of 16 relays, each individual team swam 8 relays a piece. Coach Moyse knew that the goal of the team going into the meet was to make the championship relays. In the Ranger Relays, the top 8 teams move on to the championships to compete for a spot on the podium. Luckily, because of Coach Moyse and Coach Maggard’s expert coaching abilities, the team made it to the championship and finished in first place.
The championship relays work a little differently than most relays. They start out with 8 teams at the beginning of the race, one team is eliminated as each lap progresses. This caused some trouble for the team as Moyse commented, “this is truly a test of a coach’s ability to strategize. Going into it, I could either swim all of our best swimmers at the beginning to have a shot at the #1 spot with our weaker swimmers, or I could risk it and trust that our weak swimmers could take us to the #1 spot and have our stronger swimmers compete for the title. I went with the strategy to swim our strongest swimmers last, which in the end turned out to benefit the whole team…The hardest part about this meet for me was to realize that some of the results are out of our control. Because we are a combined team with the Ursuline swimmers, I have to trust that their swim coaches will strategize well too and for me, it is hard to realize that I have to trust other coaches and admit that it is out of my control. Luckily, we were fortunate enough to be in the last leg of the race against Southlake, and we came out on top.”
In the championship relays, Jesuit made it to the final leg, swimming against their opponents, Southlake Carroll. Jesuit swimmer Brendan Feehery ’16 jumped from the starting block just as rival swimmer Alex Dettle simultaneously dove into the water. It was neck and neck the entire race until Feehery took a lead on Dettle at the very end, finishing the race strongly, earning Jesuit their third consecutive 1st place finish in the Ranger Relays. When asked about whether the pressure to continue Jesuit’s first place streak makes him nervous, he calmly remarked, “it doesn’t affect me at all. I still approach it the same way I do for every other meet.”
Abbas Hussein ’17 believed “that the Ranger Relays were a great way for the team to really come together and see what were made of. In our first few meets of the season, we finished very high and it is pushing all of us to do our best and maintain this momentum we have. We are realizing that we have started to really click as a team and become better than we could be at the beginning of the season. Our goal for this season is to just continue to get better and hopefully have some swimmers appear in the state meet at the end of the season.”
The Jesuit swim team still has a lot more meets before competing in the district, regional, and state meets, but that doesn’t stop each and every swimmer from dreaming about making that drive down to Austin and competing on the highest level in Texas’ high school swimming.
