Hegwein Family Blog

2006 Sharks "Turkey" Meet Results!

If there was ever a time for everything to go wrong during a major swim meet, this was that time. It all began on Friday night; I was working the timing consoles when the scoreboard began to fail, displaying results at random across both pools (we were running two 8-lane pools at the same time). Then the starter/strobe gun on the boys pool failed, forcing us to go to double-manual stopwatches and manual computer entry. At the same time in the scoring computer room, all hell broke loose. The initial deck-seeded entries for the 400IM's, 1000 and 1650yd free's had become corrupted, and we lost all seed times. I worked with our computer scorer until 10pm, reentering seeds, manual times, and attempting to get out the scoring results to all the coaches. I left, hoping that everything would be fixed by Saturday, as we had 800 athletes scheduled for competition.

Arriving at 10am ahead of the kids, it was still somewhat chaotic, but at least the starter was back online, as was the scoreboard. The weather was pleasant; sunny and 70 degrees, but projected to drop to 50 by 6pm, the start of Finals. Natalie got things started with the 200IM, and the result was a 3:07.64, more than 8 seconds worse than her previous best. She looked and acted fine, but in reality was still in recovery from the flu. All of her swims were off. Needless to say, she was devastated and was not her usual spunky self the rest of the weekend. Even in relative sickness, she still placed 12th out of 52 in the 50 Breaststroke, and 16th out of 42 in the 100!

Over in the boys pool, Karl had an outstanding meet. He dropped significant time in all his events, particularly in the 200yd Free, where he shed 7.48sec to finish in 2:38.95, despite mis-counting laps and stopping for 5 sec at the 150yd mark! He made Finals in 4 events; the 50 and 100yd Breaststroke, 50 Back and 50 Fly, and finished in 6th, 6th, 4th and 8th place, respectively. He moved evermore closer to Junior Olympic time standards, within 2 seconds for all of the above!

Natalie in "Flight!"

You want "Flide Lice?" Ahhh, soooo!

All in all, it was an exhausting, stressful meet, and that is why we are skipping the next one in Gainsville; we need the rest!