By Wayland D Clark
Dripping Springs swimming and diving team made the short trip to Austin where qualifiers competed in the UIL State Swimming and Diving Championships on the UT Campus with preliminaries last Friday and the Championships on Saturday. Dripping Springs boys and girls competed in eight events on Saturday including diving and brought home a bronze medal in the Girls 400 yard Freestyle Relay which was the 23rd of 24 events of the day on Saturday.
Anna Hoskovec competed in the 500 yard freestyle, and the 200 and 400 yard freestyle relays on Friday and Saturday. When she took the start block in the third leg of the Championship Final in the 400 yard freestyle relay, the sophomore and automatic qualifier, had already swam the equivalent of 18 lengths of a football field and still had 400 yards more to go.
The 400 yard free relay was one of the final events of the day and the first of four legs of the race started with Athena Turner a junior, then freshman Macie McCurry swimming next followed by Hoskovec and senior Riley Dalton, who swam fastest with a 53.20 on the final leg. The team won the bronze finishing with a time of 3:34.44, which was .08 ahead of the fourth place team time of 3:34.52.
The same team of Turner, McCurry, Hoskovec and Dalton barely came up short of a bronze medal in the 200-yard freestyle relay with a time of 1:38.43, less than a half a second behind the third place finisher’s 1:38.13 mark.
Dripping Springs' girls competing were sophomores Audrey Wilson in diving and swimmer Anna Hoskovec and Sydney Stalbaum who were automatic qualifiers, and joined by Athena Turner, Macie McCurry, and Riley Dalton. Stalbaum was an automatic qualifier in the 500 freestyle, placing 2nd at regionals and finished in 19th place at state.
Boys competing for Drip were Colin O’Conner, Gage Hembree, Joseph Parsons, Aidan Jones, Wyatt Johnson and Nolan Granger. Coco Proctor who competed in the 100 yard Breaststroke represented the Wimberley Texans.
Wilson, who dives at UT, attributes her improvement to maturity and practice, said, “I just love diving, and I hope we can get more people on the team – it’s so much fun.” Competing in the Finals as a freshman in 1 meter diving last year, Wilson improved on her total score this year moving up from eleventh place 274.15 to seventh place 392.60, setting a school record.
UIL Swimming and Diving State Meet Qualifiers and Results including Heat Sheets and results for 5A and 6A can be found on the University Interscholastic League website at www.uiltexas.org.
