Andover girls swim wins 5-1A state championship

WICHITA, Kan. (Catch it Kansas) - Andover girls swimming won its first team title in program history. The Trojans added diving this year to win the 5-1A championship, outscoring second place by 56 points.

Andover freshman, Mari Griffin said, “It was kind of hard to get going but once we got our first couple races under our belts, it seemed to go a little bit better.”

Andover’s head coach Bethany Bastian was voted 5-1A Coach of the Year at the state championship finals Saturday in Lenexa.

Bastian said, “The last three races, I was in tears because I was like, ‘This is amazing, this is why I coach.’ Basically I told them, I was like, you have to go fast, you have to do better than you did yesterday, you don’t have an option. They did it, it was crazy. It’s surreal, I can’t even believe it.”

“We knew it was a potential, we knew it’d be a close race for sure, but we’d hoped the whole season that it would lead to this moment,” said Andover senior Natalie Neugent.

“We brought on a lot of girls that had a lot of different stokes that had high places,” said Griffin.

“Next year is a new year,” said Bastian. “We are going to celebrate today, we’re going to celebrate probably all summer because it’s really awesome, we’re going to celebrate in the fall and then we’re going to work really, really hard in the spring to ensure that we can do it again.”

With Bishop Carroll winning the team state championship the past two years, this year they took third with a score of 193, scoring 65 points less than Andover.

Neugent said, “Carroll is a really great competitor and we had a lot of fun racing with them. So, it feels good to take this trophy home but we’re really proud to have them take third.”

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