City Swim Meet

Here in Greensboro, there's excitement around town because it's City Meet weekend.    Going back to 1959, neighborhood swim clubs have competed against one another in the final event of the swim team season.  Certainly there are swim meets all over the country every weekend of the summer, but this event seems to offer something that is distinctly Greensboro.  For the traditional City Swim Meet, each pool sends its top 3 swimmers for each age and stroke to the 2-day competition spanning Friday and Saturday. As a 7-year-old, first-year swimmer Jacob didn't qualify from the pool of 7 & 8 year old boys that call Green Valley home.  Instead, he competed Thursday evening in what would be described best as the junior varsity City Meet.  It's a meet for all swimmers in town not quite fast enough to qualify for the Friday/Saturday main meet.

It's really difficult to describe the logistics and environment of a swim meet with probably close to 2,000 participants.  However, the fact that the City Meet is now hosted by Greensboro's brand new state-of-the-art swimming facility makes it even more interesting.

Jacob was entered into 4 events by his coach and had what turned out to be a memorable evening in his nascent swimming career.  By placing in the top 10 of each event, he contributed valuable points to his team's total (some events had more than 100 entrants).  Individually, he set personal best times with each stroke.  The icing on the cake was a 2nd place finish in the 25 Fly...just 0.03 seconds from first!  With a time of 24.28 he bested his previous time by 2.7 seconds.

It was loads of fun to watch the exciting swimming.  Now, we're looking forward to spending some time at the balance of the meet cheering on some fellow GVP swimmers.  Having not been a competitive swimmer growing up (Jennifer was), I didn't realize how fun this could be.

A wave to the crowd after swimming an event...

Evidence of his 2nd place finish in the Fly...

Not a real high quality feed but here he is swimming the back stroke in the nearest lane.  (I'd recommend expanding it.)  He ended in 9th place overall having shaved 4.5 seconds off of his time.

Here is a video of his freestyle.  He's 2nd from the left in the green cap.  He finished in 10th place overall having shaved 1.1 seconds off of his time.