Whidbey swimmers dive into club meet

Matched their strokes with Olympic champions

North Whidbey Aquatic Club Coach Sally MacLaren-Meuer led five members of her team to the King County Aquatic Center May 17-19 to compete against 487 other swimmers in this year’s Pacific Coast Invitational meet.

Coach MacLaren-Meuer prepared her team well as all five NWAC swimmers swam to personal bests in a competition that featured top competitors such as Megan Quann (Olympic Gold Medal winner) and Dana Kirk (member of USA National Swim Team).

Sixteen-year-old Kyla Meuer and 14-year-old Missy McIntyre, two swimmers who have turned in some of the top times in the Pacific Northwest in recent years, came through with outstanding swims. Meuer, a recent Washington 4A high school freestyle champion, set a personal best in the100m butterfly and kept pace with her already strong best times in the meet’s freestyle and backstroke events. McIntyre, this year’s high school breaststroke state champion, finished as the meet’s top swimmer in the100 and 200 meter versions of that event. Swimming in a 50m freestyle race that included both Kirk and Quann, McIntyre captured second place finishing behind Quann by only .07 second. With times that were the best in her age group in all seven events she entered, McIntyre set five personal best times and five new NWAC team records, earning a meet high point swimmer award.

Lora Burge, a high school state championship silver medalist who will swim for Whitworth College next year, showed that she’s ready for college competition by swimming to personal best times in the 100m breaststroke, 50m freestyle and 200m individual medley events.

A relative newcomer to NWAC, 12-year-old Aelara Cordary showed that she may be the team’s newest rising star with outstanding swims and personal best times in the 50m and 100m butterfly and 100m breaststroke events.

Josh Luttrell, 16, NWAC’s sole male competitor in this meet, swam against stiff competition in the 50m freestyle and 100m breaststroke, accomplishing personal best times in both races.