An impressive debut

The Citrus College Women’s Swim team performed incredibly well at the Western State Conference Quad #4 on Friday. The team competed against Los Angeles Valley College, Ventura and Bakersfield. This event was the first meet of the 2013 season to be hosted at Citrus and was the school’s first home meet in over three years.

The Citrus team participated in 11 of the 22 events and made an impressive effort in each proceeding.

“We did really well. Everybody tried really hard and we made a great effort,” said Lindsey Miller of the Citrus Owls who competed in the 200-yard and the 500-yard free events.

All of the teams at the meet showed inspiring sportsmanship and continued to get better in the water. Kirsten Pampu scored 7th place in the 50-yard fly with a time of 32.51. It was her first time swimming in the event competitively this season.

The Owl’s freshman star, Chelsea Fujita-Haffner, finished in fourth place in the 50-yard free with a time of 27.25 and in fifth place for the 100-yard free with 1:00.86. This was just a tenth of a second off her best time this year.

During one of the final events of the meet, Citrus placed third in the 400-yard free relay with the team of Kirsten Pampu, Lora Marquez-Salgado, Gabriela Debia, and Chelsea Fujita-Haffner. They finished the event with a time of 4:13.04.

“The team as a whole did outstanding. Depth without question is our strong suit. You could see that in the events that we competed well in today, especially the last relay. We were able to beat a couple teams and that is simply because we had more depth towards the end of the meet,” said head coach and aquatics coordinator Andrew Silva.

“The [conference] athletes are very encouraging to each other. We understand that everything we are doing now, we are just trying to build and make ourselves better so we can go compete in other programs and state. There is a mutual respect between the programs.”

“We are all just trying our best and we are really excited to be here,” said Jessie Ball of the Ventura team who came in first in the 200-yard free and second in the 100-yard free.

The next meet will also be at Citrus, when the Owls host Santa Monica College for the last home conference meet of the season Friday, April 5. The meet is scheduled to start at 2:30 PM at the Aquatics Center.