VISAA tops off their season with virtual championship!
By Reach for the Wall Staff
The Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association provided a ‘virtual’ opportunity for participating schools to compete for a championship title. Much like how USA Swimming conducted their 18 & Under championship, over a period of time, VISAA schools could conduct meets from November 1st, 2020 through February 20th, 2021 and submit those times for consideration. Many of the same rules were in place in terms of the number of events a swimmer could be entered, however they were inventive with respect to the relay events. As stated in the Meet Announcement:
Due to Covid restrictions, relays may be entered in two possible ways:
○ Relays swum as a single relay with legal relay take-offs.
○ A combination of 4 times of swimmers who can legally make up a
relay and fit within the event limit restriction.
In a subsequent FAQ, they clarified the relay format:
For relay entries, there are 2 options…
1) Swim the relay as a relay, just as normal. Obviously following pool criteria for social distancing. This would only be for teams that are able to do this option.
2) Use aggregate times. This means you would set up events, ie: event 101 50 Back, event 102 50 Breast, event 103 50 fly, and swim each event as its own event and then add up the times to create a Relay time
We don’t have any indication in the results files which teams swam the relays in tact versus as an aggregate and applaud the ingenuity!
All times, events and scores can be found on SwimCloud: VISAA Swimming and Diving State Championship
Several schools from the DMV participated, with Flint Hill faring the best, with their divers scoring in the top 5: Spencer Bloom finishing 2nd and Ryan Griggs 5th. Michayla Eisenberg took the title for the girls and Lily Min captured 3rd. SwimCloud erroneously has Michayla and Lily listed as attending Fauquier, but the pdf results have the correct affiliations. Paul VI and St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes were the other two area schools that had swimmers that scored points!
Congratulations to all who participated/competed!!