The Vance Aquatics Club had 20 scoring swims and set 29 personal-best times during the season-ending championship meet of the Durham Summer Swim League at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Koury Natatorium on Friday and Saturday.
Vance Aquatics also posted its best relay times of the year, and in the unscored coaches’ medley relay, coaches Wendi and Chris Leas joined with team members Karissa Thomas and Michael Busada to finish second in their heat and seventh overall.
In the team competition, the Barracudas finished last among the 16 teams with 166 points, but the league’s smallest team competed with only 20 swimmers. By comparison, 15th-place Five Oaks sent out 36 swimmers, and the other teams ranged from 41 to 140 entrants.
Among Division III teams, including Vance, Homestead Heights avenged its season-opening loss to regular-season champion Willowhaven and finished first this weekend. Overall, Division I champion Parkwood won the meet.
The top scorer for Vance was 6-year-old Katelynn Ray. She finished second in breaststroke, sixth in freestyle and 11th in backstroke for 49 points. (The top 20 swimmers in each individual event earned points.)
Christopher Johnson, 6, picked up four points in the 6-and-under group by finishing 17th in backstroke, and Katelyn Johnson, 8, earned a point when she finished 20th in backstroke.
In the 13-14 age group, 13-year-old Brian Hicks secured 31 points by finishing ninth in backstroke, 11th in butterfly and 15th in freestyle.
In the 11-12 age group, Kaitlin Polak, 12, finished seventh in freestyle and 14th in backstroke and butterfly to score 30 points, and Liz Hester, 11, picked up seven points by finishing 16th in backstroke and 19th in butterfly.
In the 15-18 age group, Thomas, 16, produced 28 points with her ninth in freestyle, 11th in backstroke and 18th in butterfly, and Busada, 15, contributed 13 points with a 12th in breaststroke and 19th-place finishes in freestyle and butterfly.
In the 9-10 age group, which closed the meet Saturday afternoon, Sarah Blackwell, 10, added three points when she finished 18th in backstroke.
The six 9- and 10-year-old Barracudas combined to post 12 personal bests. Blackwell, Kimberly Polak, Meaghan Johnson, Julleah Norton, Curtis Ray and Joshua Jacobs each closed the summer season by breaking at least one personal record.
Also improving their best times in at least one event were Busada, Thomas, Hester, Hicks, Kaitlin Polak, Cameron Butler, Alexis Brown, Katherine Kovaleski, Katelynn Ray and Katelyn Johnson.
In the relays, the girls cut 0.06 second off their best time of the season to finish 14th, and the boys sliced more than six seconds off their time to finish 15th.