It’s Super Bowl weekend! Not football because that’s over and who cares. No, it’s day 1 of the Atlantic East Conference swimming championship meet at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. A multi-day swim meet with morning and evening sessions is our idea of fun, and we need some fun up in here, I tell you what.
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The weather for this weekend is all over the place, as is typical for Maryland at this time of year or any other. I’ll see your crazy ass in Hell, Maryland weather. We had a snowstorm yesterday and it was bitterly cold. We teleworked, all of us; and I didn’t leave the house even one time. Today it’s about 20 degrees warmer and the snow is melting rapidly. It was very foggy when we woke up this morning; foggy and dim and gray-green and soft. Now it’s just sort of gray and dim, but clearing.
Marymount won the championship last year, and we hope for a repeat on the men’s side. The women, having lost four of their best swimmers thanks to graduation last year, are very unlikely to repeat. They might even end up in third place. The coaches’ poll has St. Mary’s winning both the men’s and women’s meet, but Marymount soundly defeated St. Mary’s in regular season dual meet competition. Of course, dual meets in January are a very different thing from conference meets in February. The bottom line? We’ll see. We will just see.
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We are off to a very strong start. The Marymount men's 200 medley and 800 freestyle relays flipped the psych sheet, winning both events despite their second place seeding. My son's relay, the 200 medley, also broke their own team record as well as the meet and conference records for that event. It was exciting.
It's Friday morning now, clear and sunny and 20 degrees colder than I would prefer but I will take the sunshine. We're in the stands at the Michael P O'Brien Athletics and Recreation Center at St Mary's College, waiting for prelims to begin. The mood is festive. It's a little mini vacation for college swim parents, here and at conference meets all over the country, and we're going to have fun. The vibe, as the kids say, is immaculate, and we're going to keep it that way.
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It's Saturday morning and we're crowded back into the stands at MPOARC waiting for prelims. It's 100 breast day. 100 breast is my son's marquee event and he's seeded third but he's been swimming really well and anything could happen. The Marymount boys are ahead by about 30 points. It's good to have the lead but that is a very tight margin in a championship meet. No one is running away with this today. It's going to come down to the last day.
My phone, on which I am writing right now, has been blowing up all weekend. Signal groups, Marymount parents GroupMe chats, texts from friends and family - out of control. I’m a little bit disoriented as I whipsaw back and forth between panicked updates from friends hearing from fellow feds abruptly fired on Friday to where are we meeting for happy hour messages on the GroupMe to updates on my mom's health from my sisters and brother. There's a lot happening. This weekend is going to be memorable for more reasons than swimming.
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It's Sunday now, the 4th and final day of AEC Championships. Tomorrow will feel like the day after Christmas when I was 6. It's been such a fun weekend and I'll be sad that it's over. A few days of cheering and screaming and parents happy hour and hotel chilling was a welcome break from all of this. You know what “all of this" means, I assume (gesturing wildly at everything).
And my son is now officially the greatest 100 breaststroker in Marymount history. He won both prelims and finals yesterday, and broke the program record with his finals swim, winning his first individual championship gold. A short time later, he and his relay teammates beat a heavily favored St. Mary's relay team to take the program and conference records in the 400 medley relay. The boys have a solid but not insurmountable lead heading into Day 4. Everyone needs to bring it today. They need to bring it and then leave it in the pool.
Our girls will not be able to overcome a huge St Mary's lead today but yesterday they were one point away from falling to third place, and today, they are almost assured of a solid second place finish thanks to some absolutely heroic swims, including a 400 medley relay that completely over achieved, grabbing an unexpected program record in the process.
People have just been lovely, too. Everyone we have encountered this weekend, from our fellow parents to the hotel staff to the cashiers at the Lexington Park Wawa, has been delightful. The immaculate vibes prevailed wherever we went.
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| The greatest 100 breaststroke swimmer in Marymount University history. |
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At last year's meet, I noticed a beautiful Black woman, always dressed in yellow, taking photos at the meet. One day, she wore a knife-pleated knee-length yellow skirt with sparkling clean white tennis shoes. 9 out of 10 women could not pull off that look, but this woman did. She looked immaculate, stylish, comfortable, and completely at ease. The same woman was back on deck with her camera this year, and she wore that skirt twice. On Sunday, she wore a sleeveless yellow mock-neck blouse with yellow pants and flip-flops (it’s hot in a natatorium, especially during a meet). She must work for the Conference or perhaps for the athletic department at St. Mary’s, because parents are not allowed on the deck during a meet. There are no best-dressed awards at a college swim championship but if there were, this woman would have run away with it. 10/10. No notes.
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It rained all day Saturday, and although the weather forecast called for a full day of rain on Sunday, the rain ended by about 12, and the rest of the day was clear and sunny and unexpectedly warm though very windy. The wind forced bridge closures on Sunday afternoon, leaving Virginia parents scrambling for alternate routes home, since the 301 bridge across the Potomac was one of the closed bridges. Our Google Maps route home forced a small detour to avoid the Governor Thomas Johnson Bridge, a scary high bridge that connects Calvert and St. Mary’s County across the Patuxent River. That bridge freaks me out in the best conditions, so I’m glad we didn’t have to drive across it amid 40 mph winds.
We arrived early for the last final session, which started at 4 rather than 6 to allow sufficient time for the 1650 finals and the awards ceremony after the last event. Rather than sit in the bleachers for an hour, we took a little walk across campus, past a lovely little pond and down to the banks of the St. Mary’s River, where the campus’s more picturesque buildings are situated. We sat on Adirondack chairs and watched the water for a few minutes, and then walked back to the aquatic center, arriving 10 minutes before 4.
The bleachers at the SMCM aquatic center run the whole length of the facility, from the practice/warmup pools to the competition pool by the windows. For the sake of fairness, the team seating assignments rotate every day, and we had already had our day in the good seats at the competition pool. So it was a very nice surprise when a small group of Immaculata parents waved us over to that section, which was theirs for the day, and offered it to us, since IU had no chance of winning or even placing in the top 3. We accepted with gratitude.
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One of our swimmers has a brother who is a first-year swimmer at a very high-profile D1 program. He was a repeat Virginia state champion in several events, and qualified for Olympic Trials last year. His mother, with the benefit of her experience as a D1 parent, led us in cheers before every event that included a Marymount swimmer. We also met at the team hotel every afternoon to cheer for the swimmers as they boarded the bus back to the aquatic center for finals. We wore Marymount lanyards with our swimmers’ photos. Everyone was decked out in blue. We were a force to be reckoned with. By Saturday, several other teams’ parents groups had organized themselves into cheering squads too. The swimmers pretended to be embarrassed by the whole thing, but they loved it. Who doesn’t love a hype squad? Who doesn’t want their own cheering section?
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The aquatic center has huge windows at the starting end, which made the good seats generously shared by IU even better. When the meet started at 4, the sun was streaming in, and the sky turned pink and gold as twilight approached. It was dark by the time the Marymount boys won the last relay, putting them in first place. The girls finished as runners-up - a very good result for a very small team. Everybody brought it.
After the meet ended, we hung around with all of the other celebrating St. Mary’s and Marymount parents, taking photos of our kids and their friends with their medals and the Conference championship plaques. We got family photos in front of the AEC backdrop. We stepped out of the way of the coaches’ Gatorade soakings. We watched and laughed as the kids jumped back into the pool and their fully dressed coaches took off their shoes and jumped in after them. (Marymount Assistant Coach: “Has it been this cold all weekend? No wonder you all swam fast.”) Finally, it was time for the team to pack up and board the bus, and so we said our last goodbyes and headed home.
Normally, I don’t mind returning to the routine after a vacation or long weekend, but things are not really normal right now, are they? It was a 4-day weekend for me, because I took a vacation day for Friday and Monday was a blessed and desperately needed holiday. Federal government employees and contractors never needed a holiday more. We're traumatized. That was the plan. They wrote it down. Musk and the DOGEbags are trying to ruin everything, but they haven’t come after college swim meets yet. We can still have some nice things, at least for now.
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