McMahon 10th at CIF meet, Warriors 200-yard freestyle relay team 11th

Joe Naiman

Village News Reporter

The CIF swim meet was held May 3-6 at Granite Hills High School, and Fallbrook High School sophomore Maile McMahon placed 10th among Division I girls in the diving event.

Although the Fallbrook girls placed 21st among the 24 Division I teams, the Warriors only had three individual swimmers along with three relay teams and McMahon.

“I was encouraged by it,” Fallbrook coach Sean Redmond said of the CIF meet results. “For our performance and what we had, I was pleased.”

Swimmers, including relay teams and divers, qualify for the CIF meet based on times or diving scores during the season.

The Division I swim preliminaries were contested May 4 (the Division II preliminaries occurred May 3), the diving championship May 5, and the swim finals May 6. The swimmers including relay quartets with the eight best times during the preliminaries in each event advanced to the championship final and those whose times placed ninth through 16th earned lanes in the consolation final.

Position points were given for finishes in the finals as well as to the top 16 divers. Seven judges gave scores for each dive at the CIF meet. 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. Each of the divers performed six dives during the meet. McMahon’s dives totaled 169.40 points.

“I’m pleased with that because that was a really good bounce back for her,” Redmond said.

McMahon, who won the 2022 Valley League championship with 211.25 points, scored 132.60 points at this year’s league meet to place seventh. McMahon dove at last year’s CIF meet and accumulated 176.90 points for ninth place.

Fallbrook’s 200-yard freestyle relay team had the 12th-place preliminaries time of 1:47.50 with senior Arden Baur, junior Kela Kendall, junior Marissa Pearce, and junior Ava Papoulias comprising the quartet. Redmond changed the order of the relay team for the consolation final and Pearce, Kendall, Bauer, and Papoulias finished in 1:47.06 to give the Warriors 11th-place points.

Papoulias, junior Tatum Brown, Pearce, and junior Ava Dowden swam the 400-yard freestyle relay in that order both in the preliminaries and in the finals. Their preliminaries time of 3:55.74 ranked 11th. In the finals their time was 3:55.66 although enough other schools also reduced their times to relegate Fallbrook to 14th.

Fallbrook’s 200-yard medley relay team did not advance past the preliminaries. A time of 2:08.42 placed senior Samantha Hanlon, Kendall, Brown, and Dowden 21st.

“The relays pretty much swam faster than what they had done during the season, so that was encouraging,” Redmond said.

Dowden was the only Fallbrook swimmer in an individual final. Her 100-yard breaststroke preliminaries time of 1:10.20 placed her 13th. She finished the consolation final in 1:11.75 for 16th place. “Just finally ran out of steam when it came to Saturday,” Redmond said.

Dowden also swam the 200-yard individual medley at the CIF meet, although her preliminaries time of 2:21.44 placed 23rd and did not advance her to the finals. Kendall and Papoulias also qualified for the CIF meet as individuals, although neither advanced past the preliminaries. Papoulias had the 24th-place time in both of her events, completing the 200-yard freestyle in 2:04.66 and the 100-yard freestyle in 58.34 seconds. Kendall’s time of 1:07.82 in the 100-yard butterfly was worth 31st place.