Rhys Powell, Sam Horner, Jake Barrett and Tent Pirner made the medal stand in all three relays. (Photo by Joan Barrett) |
TOPEKA, Kans.—
Routine, normal, expected – those would NOT be words to describe the Kansas State Swimming Championship meet for The Independent School and Wichita Collegiate School. And, when you think about it, it’s not all that normal for two normally competitive schools to be cheering for each other at the end of the race. That was exactly the case, when Independent’s Andrew Parker touched the wall to claim the state championship in the 100-yard breaststroke on Saturday, Feb. 18th. He received high-fives from both Panthers and Spartans. The two teams practice and travel together; yet compete head-to-head in the pool.
Parker was a bit of a Cinderella story. The senior came into the meet seeded tenth in the event, with a season best time of 1:07.76. In the preliminaries on Friday, he came out of nowhere in lane six to claim the top seed with a personal best time of 1:02.70, dropping more than five seconds.
In the finals, the Wichita City League Breaststroke Champion Alex Khoury from Bishop Carroll was going to give Parker a race. In prelims, Khoury qualified for finals in the 500-yard freestyle before his breaststroke race. That may have slowed down his qualifying time and put him in lane six in the finals. Bishop Carroll made a strategic decision and Khoury took a leisurely swim in the finals of the 500 free, for his eighth place medal and team points. (In the finals, Khoury added more than a minute to his preliminary time of 5:06.04.)
The strategy paid off, as Khoury dropped time from Friday to Saturday in his breaststroke and gave Parker a race to the wall. It wasn’t quite enough as Parker out-touched Khoury by seven-hundredths of a second for the first place medal.
Parker’s coach, Randy McVay may have been one of the few not surprised by Parker’s performance.
”Each year he has swam for me, he kills it at state. Andrews’s race was fantastic,” said McVay.
Coach McVay also made a strategic decision with his entries for Wichita Collegiate. The team decided to forgo one individual event and enter three relay teams instead. It was a gamble as Collegiate was ranked eighth in one relay and eleventh in the two others. It was a gamble that paid off.
“WCS had talked all season about swimming three relays. Sometimes, egos get in the way of making that happen but these four boys put self aside and represented their school by medaling in all three. As a bonus they shattered their seed times and school records. That is a special group of team players,” said McVay.
Collegiate shaved time from in all three relays, as much as 8.5 seconds in one relay to make the medal stand. The relay team of sophomore Jake Barrett, freshman Trent Pirner, junior Sam Horner and junior Rhys Powell took sixth in the 200-yard medley relay in a time of 1:46.83. It was a seventh place finish for the foursome in the 400-yard freestyle relay in 3:29.83. The team then combined for an eighth place medal in the 200-yard freestyle relay in 1:34.95.
Powell also made the medal stand in the 100-yard freestyle with a time of 50.15. Powell was a likely medalist in the 50-yard freestyle which he did not enter. In swimming, competitors can enter only two individual events and two relays; or three relays and one individual event.
Collegiate’s Pirner won the consolation finals in the breaststroke in a time of 1:06.98. Horner placed 11th in the 200-yard freestyle in a time of 1:55.93. Those finishes gave Collegiate 100 team points and tied them for ninth place overall with McPherson.
The Independent School had 62 team points and finished 16th out of 27 teams. Parker also won a third place medal in the 200-yard individual medley in a time of 2:07.38. That gave him 36 points for the meet, as he finished as the fifth top individual performer and on the First Team All State.
Junior William McCandless was the other medalist for the Panthers, with a fourth place finish in the 200-yard individual medley. He clocked in at 2:09.10.
The Panthers also placed 13th in the 200-yard medley relay. The team of senior Ahmad Yassine, Parker, McCandless and sophomore Richard Zirkle clocked in at 1:49.07.
Collegiate and Independent will celebrate their seasons at a end-of-season banquet – together – later this week.
