Girls Swimming Sports Winter Sports

Andover Struggles In Dual Meet

With scores of 69-111 and 86-99, respectively, Andover Girls Swimming fell short against perennially strong Peddie and Suffield teams this past Saturday in a third-place loss that featured only one individual victory. Despite fielding a strong core of returning players, the team suffered from a lack of practice time compared to its opponents.

Jessica Gearan ’18 wrote in an email to The Phillipian, “Going into Saturday’s meet, we knew it was going to be very hard; Suffield and Peddie are very good teams who swim year round, and our team has only had a chance to practice three times. We weren’t expecting to win; we were there to have fun and enjoy the new team atmosphere.”

The meet kicked off with the 200-Yard Medley Relay in which Andover had a time of 1:55.04, placing third. The relay consisted of Allyson Ty ’18 swimming backstroke with a 27.60 split, Yifei Wu ’18 swimming breaststroke with a 33.22 split, Katherine Sweetser ’17 swimming butterfly with a 27.99 split and Captain Elizabeth Duserick ’16 swimming freestyle the final leg with a 26.23 split.

Andover would secure its most successful relay performance in the freestyle relay, placing second.
In the 200-Yard Freestyle Relay, the team of Elizabeth Tran ’19, Sasha Newton ’16, Sweetser, and Juliette Farmer ’18 nabbed second place behind Peddie in a time of 1:46.51 with splits of 26.57, 27.07, 26.68, and 26.19 respectively.

In the 200-Yard Individual Medley (IM), Tran placed third with a time of 2:19.52, almost swimming down the second place finisher from Peddie.

“My 200 IM felt pretty good considering it’s so early in the season, but we’ve only had a few practices leading up to the meet. In the next few weeks I’m probably going to be working on my walls and breaststroke technique since those are my weaker parts of the race,” wrote Tran in an email to The Phillipian.

Ty swam the 50-Yard Freestyle in a time of 25.12, which placed her second behind one Peddie swimmer. Later in the meet, Ty swam the 100-Yard Backstroke in a time of 59.66, making her the only girl on the Andover team to win an event.

“Winning is not always the most important thing to achieve in a swim meet. How we act on our team, especially towards other teammates, plays an important role in the development of our team,” wrote Ty in an email to The Phillipian.

Although the outcome of this meet is not what the team hoped for, it remains optimistic.
Sweetser wrote to The Phillipian, “This meet does not have much influence over the season to come. Going into this weekend we only had three practices, so I can’t wait to see how the team will do once we have done more substantial training.”

With the first meet of the season under its belt, Andover will hit the pool against Choate on January 9.