By Scott Vanscoy (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
Glendale Swimming hosted the 2018 Girls Springfield Invitational on Saturday afternoon. More than 420 swimmers participated in the meet, representing 24 different schools from across the state. At the end of the day, Lafayette came out on top with 403 points; Glendale was second with 291.
Glendale/Ozark coach Steve Boyce was pleasantly surprised by his teams’ performances.
“It was a very good meet for us, we had fantastic swims in both schools,” said Boyce. “It started with our medley relays today; Ozark made their automatic cut for State, which they weren’t even close to before but they dropped six seconds. Glendale dropped a couple of seconds and won it today. I was a little surprised that we won it. I didn’t think that we could win it today but Lafayette, that won the meet, has been very strong and our girls just stepped up ready to race today. That set the tone for the whole rest of the day.”
One of Glendale’s swimmers on that relay was junior Danielle Robinson. After almost a five and a half hour break between the relay and her next event, she won the 100 yard Breaststroke with a time of 1:08.065, easily qualifying for State.
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“It is a big meet, there’s teams from St. Louis and Kansas City that come down,” said Robinson. “Going in, I was seeded first but by like .02 or something. It was a lot of competition and I got really nervous right before racing. Coach told me to go out my fastest, do my best, because in the 200 medley relay I had the fastest split of the night. I just tried to get out ahead of my competition on the first fifty. I try to see if I’m close to the person next to me because that determines how many strokes I want to take. It feels good to win; it was really a tough competition. It is a big meet for Glendale and it was really good to win.”
Boyce couldn’t have been more proud of Robinson.
“Danielle, to wait five and a half hours by the time she got to swim and come through and win that race, go her season best time—that’s spectacular,” said Boyce. “That girl loves to race so I don’t have to work hard on making her race. We’ve got a couple little details that we are going to work on with her turns and I think we can get that going.”
Summit Prep/NCA senior Molly Moore set two meet records in her two events. She also swam the anchor leg for her team in the last relay of the night, the 400 yard Freestyle. Her team trailed and she entered the water in fourth place, but she managed to pass two swimmers on her leg to put her team in second place.
“I won the 50 Free and the 100 Backstroke,” said Moore. “Then, with the relay, yeah, I was a little stoked about that. Today is the first day we’ve had a relay, we’ve had a transfer student come in and she decided to swim so we finally got a relay together. It’s really cool having a team with four people. The two events I won tonight are the only two events I’m focusing on this season. My ultimate goal is to win state in the 50 Free and 100 Back and I’m looking forward to the next couple weeks.”
Summit/NCA coach Alex Miller credited Moore’s work ethic for her success in the pool.
“Molly gets everything she has because of her workout,” said Miller. “She busts her tail every single day, two practices a day, to do what she does. She’s a great teammate; she’s a great swimmer, obviously. I’m just along for the ride at this point.”
Miller also doubles as Parkview’s swim coach and was happy with the Lady Vikings’ success. Parkview finished in the middle of the field at 17th.
“They (Parkview) get better every single week and as a coach, that’s all you can hope for,” said Miller. “Audrey Duchscherer finished fifth in the 200 Free and fifth in the 100 Back. She also has the 200 Free cut time. It’s been a while since Parkview has been to State. All we can do is keep training.”
With Glendale’s second place finish and Ozark’s eighth place finish, Boyce would seem well on his way to having his teams ready for State, which is in three weeks (February 15-17).
“We will start resting for state; we haven’t really started that process so we’ll start resting and see if we can go even faster,” said Boyce. “We’ve got the Southwest MO Championship this next weekend. There will be about 18 teams from the Southwest Missouri area coming here. It will be our local area, kind of like Districts in a lot of other sports. That will be a fun one, too. Ozark has Chloe Nelson in all the individual events; she can only swim two of them. Ozark’s relays have all made the consideration cuts, the medley relay made the automatic cut, and the 400 Free relay just missed the automatic cut. Those are great relays. We’ll get after a 200 here again and see if we can get them moving along.”
“On the Glendale side,” said Boyce, “we’ve got all three relays in big-time. Having them in for sure and having an opportunity to score big points is going to be a big deal. Individually we are now at about 10 kids with cuts that I think will get into the state meet. That should be a lot of fun. Glendale is going to be in the hunt for the trophies. I think we’ll be in the top four and it should be an interesting battle to see what happens. We’ll learn a lot over the next week when everybody around the state swims their conference championships and that. Then we’ll have a little better idea. We still have to go out and do battle at State.”
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