By Reese Meister
**Disclaimer: Reese Meister is a member of the FVHS swim team.
Qualifying members of the Fountain Valley High School (FVHS) swim team competed at the Division I California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section Finals on Saturday. To compete at CIF finals, swimmers must have finished in the top eighteen times in their event at Thursday’s prelims session, which they qualified for by meeting certain time standards during the regular season. Overall, the FVHS Barons placed fifth among the girls’ teams with 139 points and twentieth among the boys with 47 points, an impressive achievement given the 556 schools in the Southern Section and 40 schools in Division I.
Santa Margarita Catholic High School’s girls’ team, a swimming powerhouse and last year’s national champions, swept the girls’ competition with 439 points, over 200 more than the second place team, Mira Costa High School. While facing tighter competition, their boys’ team also won the meet with their roster of talented swimmers.
FVHS competed in the first event of the meet, the girls’ 4 x 50 yard medley relay with a team of freshman Alyssa Ton, junior Kaitlyn Nguyen, senior captain Jianna Balta and junior Leyna Nguyen. The team came out of prelims seeded third, and in a close race with many competitive teams, Leyna Nguyen sprinted to finish the freestyle leg, out-touch Poly-Riverside and come in fourth with a time of 1:44.79, also breaking the FVHS team record.
Ton dealt with back-to-back events, having little turn-around time between swimming the backstroke leg in the relay and competing in the 200 yard freestyle, an event she was coming into as the top seed from prelims. However, despite the short rest period and expectations for Ton’s first CIF meet, she pushed through the end of her race to secure her position as CIF champion in the event. While Poly-Riverside’s Ava DeAnda went out faster than Ton in the first half, Ton maintained her speed in the second 100 yards, finishing with a time of 1:45.96 and setting another school record.
Ton shared her excitement about her win and how she enjoyed the competition at the meet, where she raced against many teammates and competitors from club swimming.
“I think it was great to win my first CIF,” Ton said. “It was really fun to race against all of my friends.”
Sophomore Peter Vu also competed in the championship final of the 200 yard freestyle, returning as the only member of the Barons’ boys’ team to qualify for finals. Vu found success in his impressive consistency, entering the event as the sixth seed and maintaining his position by dropping .04 seconds from his prelims time to come in at 1:38.50.
In the next event, the 200 yard individual medley, Kaitlyn Nguyen entered finals as the second seed. The event’s national high school record-holder, Santa Margarita junior Teagan O’Dell, seemed to easily win the race, but Nguyen was in a neck-in-neck race with Mira Costa’s Bella Brito for second. It came down to the freestyle leg, and although Nguyen saw over a second improvement from prelims, Brito came in slightly ahead, resulting in Nguyen’s time of 1:59.08 earning her third place.
The Barons didn’t compete in another event until the 100 yard butterfly, which Ton had qualified to swim as the eighth seed in the finals. With a 0.3 second improvement from her preliminary time, Ton moved into seventh place with a time of 55.03, contributing valuable points to the Barons.
Kaitlyn Nguyen and Vu both competed in the 100 yard breaststroke for their final individual events of the meet. Nguyen once again faced the competition of Brito, entering finals slightly ahead of her as the number one seed. The two pushed each other in a race similarly exciting to their individual medley, but Brito’s significant improvement from her preliminary time allowed her to pull ahead of Nguyen in the end. Nonetheless, Nguyen’s second-place time of 1:01.40 provided crucial points for FVHS and remained an incredible achievement.
Vu, meanwhile, came into the event as the second seed, but San Marino’s Daniel Li led the event by over one second in both prelims and finals. It then came down to a close race for second place, and Vu was able to out-touch Mater Dei’s Elonzo Santos by .07 seconds by coming in at 54.63.
Coming out of the 100 yard breaststroke, Kaitlyn Nguyen had little rest time before competing with her team in the 4 x 100 yard freestyle relay, the meet’s final event. The lineup of Ton, Kaitlyn Nguyen, Leyna Nguyen and senior captain Reese Meister entered finals as the eighth seed. With a small time improvement and teams from Portola, San Marcos and Santiago-Corona adding from prelims, the relay team moved into fifth place with a time of 3:30.35 for a strong finish to the meet.
Head coach Nathan Wilcox shared his contentment with the team’s performance at CIF.
“When I scored the meet, [the girls] were seventh place, and we finished in fifth,” Wilcox said. “I think we really came out well and we swam really well in finals, and we kind of left it all on the table.”
With the Barons’ highest point scorers of Kaitlyn Nguyen, Ton and Vu continuing to swim for FVHS next year, it seems that the team has potential to find similar success in the future. Specifically for Ton, she will work toward another individual CIF championship and continued time improvements. Wilcox expressed similar optimism in the team’s future and hopes for the program.
“I think the hope is to continue to have the momentum growing in the right direction but also work on becoming more of a team environment — not so individualistic,” Wilcox said. “[It is also to] focus on building around a team and the Baron way of coming in and trying to finish just a little higher.”
