For the second day in a row, Canyons had a swimmer in the evening big show at USA Nationals. Tonight it was Andrea Kropp swimming the 200 breaststroke in the B final. Andrea, who is an All American swimmer at USC, has returned to Canyons to train under Coach Coley. She was an age group swimmer with Canyons more than ten years ago. Strong in several events, Andrea’s specialty is the breaststroke and today she did some great work in the pool today at Irvine. The morning swim was strong, but Andrea failed to drop enough time to get into the A final. Determined to leave with a solid time and a great race she returned for the B final tonight and swam a 2:27.97. That time broke her own club open record of 2:29.20 set earlier this year at SMOC. The time was solid albeit not her personal record. She finished second in her race but her time was the fifth fastest of the meet. Team record trivia – Andrea owns the biggest gap in team records. Her oldest record is from 2002 and her newest is from 2014 –- a 12 year span of time. The next largest record span by a different swimmer is only 7 years. Earlier in the day her brother, Peter had an outstanding swim in the 200 breaststroke that was just few one hundredths off the club record. Since Peter is 18 years old (and about to be a sophomore at Duke) the race earned him a slot in the C final, which is reserved for the fastest eight 18 & unders all vying for national team or World university games status. Unfortunately, Peter was disqualified. Coach Coley did his best to get the call overturned, but overturning a DQ is rare and did not happen. Peter’s best event is the 100 breaststroke which will race on Saturday. Tune in to see him get it done. We had a Canyons first today – Tamara Santoyo set the team record in the 50 fly. How did she do that? Well, she did swim fast, 27.84 to be exact, but even if she swam with a piano on her back, the record would be hers because she was the first Canyons swimmer over 12 years old to swim the event. The 50 fly is rarely swum in America, but is found in international competition. Since this is a selection meet for two international events, USA Swimming chose to hold the event. The Canyons men have yet to score in this meet, but the women are tied for 16th out of 56 scoring teams.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:10:56 +0000