Maggie Woods has been an impact swimmer for Albemarle’s girls swim team since she joined the squad as a freshman.
The Patriots have won two straight team state championships during her career, and Woods has wrapped up countless individual event wins. But the Ben Hair meet title has proven elusive, with Western Albemarle winning the last three of the traditional early January events.
That drought is over.
“It’s really exciting, this is my first year winning and that’s really fun,” Woods said. “We also get to see people we know because we’ve swum for club teams or the JSL so it’s a really fun atmosphere.”
Woods won the 100-freestyle and 50-freestyle events and also swam the anchor legs on both the first place 200 and 400-freestyle relays as apart of a huge night by the Patriots with 542 points to outpace second place Western that tallied 407.50 points.
Ashley Huang also had a big impact for the Patriots, swimming on the first place 200-medley and 200-free relays while taking second in the 200-IM and winning the 100-back.
Rachel Wang finished with two second places for the Patriots in the 100-free and 100-fly while Grace Farmar took second in the 500-free with Brianna Nesbitt third. Behind Huang in the 100-back, Brianna Coffindaffer and Maren Weathersby took second and third for Albemarle while Megan Jones was third in the 100-breast. Farmar and Coffindaffer took second and third in the 200-free as well.
The relay sweep of all three event titles in particular showed just how deep the Patriots are as they look for their third-straight state title in Group 5A under new head coach J.J. Bean.
“We set goals for everybody on the team and I think they did a really good job of getting their goals,” Bean said. “We’re four or six or eight deep in every (stroke) so I knew we had a chance to do something special.”
While the Western girls’ string of six-straight titles in this event, formerly known as the City/County meet as late as 2010, came to an end, they had some solid performances including a double-event winning performance by Brazil Rule, who won the 200-free and 100-fly. The Warriors also got a solid outing from Morgan James who took second in the 50-free and third in the 100-free while Colleen Higgins took third in the 100-breast and fifth in the 200 IM. But beyond that the Warriors didn’t get the kind of tremendous performance that it would’ve needed to hang with the Patriots.
“It kind of humbles us and I think it’ll make people work harder for states,” Rule said. “We know our mistakes here and now we can fix them.”
The meet also served as a coming out party for Louisa County freshman Alexa Owen as the ninth grader won a pair of events in the 500-free and 200-IM.
Other event winners included STAB’s Alyssa Gonnella in the 1-meter diving held Monday at Woodberry Forest and Covenant’s Mackenzie Lawson in the 100-breast.
