Mia Wonacott ’24 swims in the 50-Yard Freestyle event.
Saturday 1/27 – Andover: 96, Deerfield: 89
Tuesday 1/30 – Andover: 107, Westford: 61
Currently undefeated, Andover Girls Swimming and Diving (4-0) took home a win against Deerfield on Saturday despite low numbers due to the illnesses spreading around campus. Andover followed up its victory against Deerfield with another win against Westford Academy (Westford) on Tuesday at home.
Sahana Manikandan ’26 highlighted Hannah Song ’27 and her performance at Deerfield overcoming her nerves before her race. Though Saturday’s meet was away, Manikandan noted Andover’s uplifting spirit and positivity to keep energy high.
“Hannah Song, she’s a [Junior], I think she did really good because she was a little nervous before the race for her 500, but she did great… There [were] a lot of great times, so everyone was able to cheer the team on. If you wanted, everyone had the person behind their lane [who] cheered them on when they were swimming, so every single teammate was encouraging, psyched up, and pushed all of us to be our best selves,” said Manikandan.
Co-Captain Molly MacKinnon ’24 pointed to Ariana Zhao ’25 as a standout performance in the 500-Yard Freestyle event despite it being a newer event for her. MacKinnon also underscored performances in the 200-Yard Freestyle as particularly strong for the team, with Andover taking the top four spots.
“Ariana Zhao, Class of ’25, had a really good swim in the [500-Yard Freestyle], which is the event that she doesn’t normally swim in, but she absolutely killed it. It was really fun to watch her race. Then we also had really strong swimmers in the [200-Yard Freestyle] today and we swept the event. So we got first, second, third and fourth place, which is really fun. Good way to start out the meet,” said MacKinnon.
MacKinnon elaborated on what she anticipates the team will work on in preparation for Easterns [interscholastic swimming and diving championships (Easterns)]. She thinks that the next focus of the team is to work on turning and tapering to make times as fast as possible for the upcoming meet.
“A lot of us are really going to focus on our turns just because they can always be tightened up, and shaving a few seconds off of every turn in the race has a pretty big impact on the rest of the race. Really we’re just going to be training as hard as we can in preparation for Easterns which are pretty soon, we’re going to start doing what’s called tapering, so focusing on really fast swimming in practice but getting a lot of rest. It’s just like swimming that basically rests your body and prepares you to swim faster for competitions like Easterns where our times matter a lot more,” said MacKinnon.
Niki Tavakoli ’27, a diver for Andover, spoke on what she thinks the divers will work on this week. Tavakoli explained how diving practice consisted of practicing a different type of dive each week for competition.
“Every week we have a type of dive that we have to get two of in order to compete. Most of our team is new so we don’t have many dives so each week we focus on getting a dive in that week’s category. This week is reverse dives and not many of our team can do a type of those, so most of the team is focusing on just getting their head in the water the right way that would count as a reverse and not focusing on the points a judge would give. In order to compete, we need to know how to do two dives from that week’s category,” said Tavakoli.
Girls Swimming and Diving will have its next meet on Saturday at Loomis Chaffee.
