2024 Sectional Prelims // Thursday night

 The girls swimming team kicked off the sectional prelim races on Thursday night.  

Earlier in the week, Marissa had come home pretty discouraged because the heat sheets that had come out showed that she would swim in the 4th seed on Thursday night for the 50 freestyle and the 3rd seed for the 100 freestyle.  She felt like this meant that she wasn't going to be fast enough to really compete for the win in the finals and that really discouraged her.  She didn't really want to talk about it for a long time because it was really causing her to be stressed so we tried to respect that, but Noel did try to remind her that seed times are just that... just seed times to get an idea of where you should go.  It doesn't mean that you are really that level, or that time.  It's just a place to start from and times do not really matter until you are actually in the pool and swimming the event.  That did seem to help encourage her a bit.  Her coach also  told her that he thought she was just fine and he believed she could win the whole thing.  (Noel and I agreed - we have watched her pull out way too many underdog wins - but there are no guarantees so we did have to think about what might happen if things didn't go as we all hoped).

In any case, she showed up to the Thursday night prelims ready to go.  She began to do her stretches and dryland with the team, but then she stepped away and stood by herself for a while.

Coach D also spent some time just talking to her and encouraging her.  He knows that she has the skills and is in good enough shape to win, she just needs the encouragement to believe that she can do it.

And then it was time for them to get into the water and take their warm-up laps.

Marissa is standing on the blocks in lane #2.  They pulled out the silver sectional caps this year.

A couple more practice starts...

Some final words from the coach...

...a quick stop to acknowledge her Gramie C...

...and then it was time to kick off the preliminary events with the Medley Relay.  Marissa would be swimming the freestyle leg of this race.

They would swim okay and ended up placing 6th in the preliminary heat.  It was enough to get them into the championship heat on Saturday though, so that would be enough for now.

Then Marissa would head to the diving well where she would swim laps back and forth to stay "warm" for her 50 race which was coming up after three other events.  She would be swimming in the 5th heat of the race in lane 5.  

She looked so nervous.  It was really making me nervous, that's for sure!

Once she stood up on the blocks, I stopped taking pictures and just watched her swim.  She would actually win her heat, moving her up to a 3rd place seed with a seed time of 25.58.  

A while later, she would be back in action again.  This time for the 100 freestyle where she went into the prelims seeded 3rd.  

Once again, she would win her heat but finished with a 2nd place seed heading into the championships and a new season's best time of 56.11.  (We weren't going to complain with a 2nd place seed time.  She didn't really want to be first and have that "target" on her back.  She likes to see the competition and then chase them down.)

Marissa would finish out her night by anchoring the 200 freestyle relay.   The team won their heat and finished with a #1 seed overall, but with two of the teams not racing their fastest swimmers in the prelims, I wasn't sure that we would hold on to that placing in the championship race on Saturday.  

With the preliminaries finished and new times on the books, we could all go home and just rest on Friday.  Marissa now had a better idea of where she really was in relation to the other swimmers and she was actually feeling much more confident.  Now she knew exactly what times she was dealing with and she felt really strongly that she could suit up on Saturday and be in serious contention for the win.

'Guess time would tell us that soon enough.