Swimming conundrums…
By Robert Przybylo
BPrzybylo@opubco.com
Even when you’re confident about your selections, picking All-City teams is never an easy thing to do.
And this year’s version of swimming became that much tougher when the classes were split up.
Here is the list for the boys and for the girls.
Someone who placed second in 5A might have well come in seventh or eighth in 6A. So in the end, I tried to gauge it by time more than say ranking. Swimming is swimming. There’s no real, tangible advantage to swimming for an Edmond or Jenks team compared to say Altus or Bixby or Heritage Hall.
If you know how to swim, you know how to do it. Maybe the bigger schools have better resources, but if a swimmer really wants to, there are ways to not get left behind.
That solved that issue for me.
The second was the “sad” saga of Norman North sophomore Wilson Wei and Edmond North senior Nikki Colton.
Individually, they may be two of the best 10 boys/girls swimmers in the state. But at state itself, they were in events where they came up just short and couldn’t make the first team.
Wei competed in the 200 IM and the 500 free. Well, you can’t take anything away from Edmond Memorial’s Daniel Enge, who placed higher than Wei in the IM and Deer Creek’s Typ Whinnery had the fastest 500 free time of anybody in any class in the prelims.
And then there’s Colton. This was a tough one. Either Colton or EM’s Jill Enge wasn’t going to make the first team. That’s just the way the draw worked out.
Colton placed second in the 200 IM while Enge placed third. Kaylee Steffen of Putnam West won the event. However, Lizzy Whitbeck of McGuinness had the top time, so Whitbeck gets the edge. Steffen finds a spot in the 100 backstroke.
And then in the breaststroke, Enge tops Colton by .07, so it has to go to Enge based on that.
Both Wei and Colton made the second team in less than a second when I was putting it together.
No doubts on Westmoore’s Dakota Wheeler being Swimmer of the Year. What he did this last year was impressive.
Girls Swimmer of the Year came down to Whitbeck and Putnam North’s Parris Schoppa.
Did a little more research, and Schoppa’s times in the 50 and 100 free weren’t just good in Oklahoma. They’re impressive in the nation. Whitbeck didn’t lose the award, but I felt Schoppa earned the honor.
***
The album cover we re-created was The White Stripes. After initially bringing up the idea to Dakota and Parris, the toughest thing became where to shoot it.
We shot it on-location at one of the Switzer’s Locker Room storage facilities on S. Walker. Asking the place for permission was one of the more strange things I’ve done.
But with the help of genius photographer Chris Landsberger, thought it came out rather well.
So with that said, I close the pool for now and head back out to the tennis courts in what is shaping up to be a most intriguing year on the hardcourts.
