On Saturday November 12th, UC San Diego Club Swim attended its first meet for the school year at UCLA’s CISCA Invitational. With a team of 29 swimmers, this was our biggest turnout yet. A total of five schools competed at the swim meet: USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Irvine and SCU. Both our men’s and women’s teams finished in 2nd place with a total of 589 points and 537 points, respectively! First place for men’s was won by UCLA with a total of 732 points, while first place for women’s was won by USC with a total of 566 points. Overall, UC San Diego Club Swim came in 3rd after UCLA and USC.

Our relays did extremely well, with women’s A team (Vylana Trang, Kirsten Tang, Hanna Landry, Jocelyn Wei) coming in 1st in the 400 freestyle relay, and 2nd for both the 200 medley and the 200 freestyle relay. In a surprising turn of events, UC San Diego’s men’s B team (Kotachi Liu, Anton Anderson, Martin Litre, Ryan Sitar) came in 2nd for both the 200 and 400 freestyle relays, beating our men’s A team (Nathaniel Carter, Ryan Lee, Chris Robinson, Jackson Ziegler) narrowly in both events.

In the individual events, Hanna Landry performed exceptionally, taking home first place for both the 50 breast and the 100 free, with times of 34.06 and 57.92, respectively. She was followed closely in the 50 breast by Vylana Trang, who scored second place with a time of 34.16. Martin Kushnerov, a second year, won first place in both the 50 and 100 breaststroke, with times 28.12 and 1:04.32, respectively. Esmeralda Naranjo, a freshman swimmer claimed first place in the 50 fly, scoring a personal best with a time of 29.90. Special recognition goes to Yusi, Zecheng and Leslie, first year athletes who had never competed at a swim meet before coming to UC San Diego.

Overall, the meet was a great success. Despite coming in 3rd overall, our individual men’s and women’s teams both came in 2nd, indicating a lot of promise for our upcoming quarters. We will use this meet as motivation and a learning experience to prepare ourselves for next year.