Warrior girls 19th at CIF meet

Joe Naiman

Village News Reporter

Fallbrook High School’s girls swim team placed 19th among the 28 Division I schools at the CIF swim meet May 4-7 at Granite Hills High School.

The Division I swim preliminaries were held May 4; the diving championship took place May 6, and the swim finals were contested May 7. The swimmers or relay teams with the top eight preliminaries times in each event advanced to the championship finals while the next eight fastest times were worth a lane in the consolation finals, and position points were given for those 16 positions. Fallbrook’s girls scored 27 points for their positions, including two diving scores among the top 16.

“I was excited and proud of what they did,” said Fallbrook coach Sean Redmond.

Five judges scored each dive. The two highest scores and the two lowest scores were discarded, and the three middle scores were added together and then multiplied by the dive's degree of difficulty to determine the score for each dive. In her first CIF meet, freshman Maile McMahon accumulated 176.90 points on six dives for ninth place among Division I girls. Fallbrook’s other diver at the CIF meet, junior Payton Wilson, obtained 165.75 points to give the Warriors 12th-place points.

Consolation finals position points were obtained by sophomore Ava Dowden. Her time of 1:10.87 in her 100-yard breaststroke preliminary heat placed ninth among Division I girls, and a time of 1:11.73 gave her fourth place in the consolation final and 12th place overall. Dowden had the 16th-fastest preliminaries time in the 50-yard freestyle at 25.80 seconds, and although her finals time of 25.84 seconds was slower she placed 13th in that event.

The 50-yard freestyle preliminaries also included sophomore Ava Papoulias, whose time of 59.41 seconds placed 28th.

Fallbrook reached the consolation finals in one of the three relay races. Ava Papoulias, junior Maya Papoulias, senior Grace Goode, and Dowden had a preliminaries time of 3:58.84 to place 15th. They also finished 15th in the finals while improving their time to 3:57.80.

That race closed out Goode’s high school career. She completed her portion of the relay in under one minute. “She had been trying to do that all season, so that was really fun to watch her do,” Redmond said.

Fallbrook’s 200-yard medley relay team of junior Alexis Fieri, Dowden, sophomore Kela Kendall, and sophomore Marissa Pearce had the 18th-place preliminaries time of 2:01.90. The Warriors’ 200-yard freestyle relay team at the CIF preliminaries consisted of junior Arden Bauer, Goode, Kendall, and Pearce; they had the 19th-fastest preliminaries time at 1:50.02.