The Manhattan highs boy swim team kicked off the second half of their season with a meet on last Friday at Lawrence against Shawnee Mission and FreeState. They scored third overall while most of the boys set a new personal record

“Our J.V. kids had the best time so that was really good to see. I saw a lot of PRs there, Varsity kids,” Head Coach Alex Brown. “I saw a lot of consistency, they’re maintaining their times, which is what I want to see at this point in the season. I don’t expect them to PR in the middle of the season, that’s what a month from now is for.” 

The team has been extending the distances during practice to help with times and it’s starting to pay off. 

“We started really going longer distance, rather than just like an hour and a half that we went to like two or two and a half hour sets, so that was good to get some distance work in,” sophomore Mitchel Bunger said. 

The team is about to start the hardest week of training to begin their taper for the end of the season.

“Our big focus will be on our race based training and really getting quality in the next couple of weeks when we have no competition,”  Brown said. “We can just really focus on hitting the times that we want to hit, in practice, instead of translating to competitions later.”

But not only is the varsity improving but most of the J.V. team is as well. 

“[Freshman] Drew Hutchinson is new and he was quarantined for like the first couple weeks of the season,” Bunger said. “For a second week he did really good and I was pretty impressed with him.”

“[Sophomore] Marshall Garen had a really good meet. He dropped a ton of time and he’s 50 and 100 free,” Brown said. “He’s been really consistent with his times and holding a very solid time so I think he’s gonna do well.” 

Although the swim slide of the team did well, so did junior diver Zeke Kohl when he placed second at the meet. 

The team did what they were expected to do when going up against Shawnee and Free State. 

“The three out of three, which was to be expected, which is what on paper we were supposed to be, and that’s okay,” Brown said. 

Both of the opposing teams are seeded in the top five for state, making this past meet a hard one, but the swimmers still had to PR and place individually in the top three. 

“We’re ready to get to this next week, and see how we do,” Brown said.