Last week on Thursday, your Newman swim team competed at St. Martins against St. Martins, Country Day, and East Jefferson. Usually St. Martins’pool is extremely warm. This means that while it is easier to get in the pool initially, mid-race you become hot rather quickly, which is not a pleasant feeling. So when I jumped in for warmups expecting it to be warm I suddenly felt a quick chill go up my spine and was surprised that it was actually much colder than last year and even colder than our pool. The one main event that had our (now cold) team sweating was the 500 freestyle, or as I like to call it, death. We had two brothers swimming in this event for a state time. The 500 freestyle is the longest event offered at state, and it is the only long distance event. For this excruciating race, you need to swim the length of the pool 20 times. Up until their sixth lap, there was not much cheering. As we saw the time start to tick down, we began to cheer a lot, as we had a feeling they would beat the state time by a huge margin. So, the whole team, exhausted from our own events as we were, got to the side of the pool and yelled and screamed in support of our fellow swimmers. Every time they took a breath we made sure they would see us supporting them. Both swimmers made the 500 freestyle state times, and the whole team felt triumph. As you know from the assembly on Monday, the boys and girls team claimed victory once again, and we remain undefeated.  Usually the support of our teammates is just enough to give us motivation and get us through the meet, but this time, the prospect of homemade waffles made by one of our teammates’ parents brought in gave us the extra push to go the extra mile. Our next meet is this weekend at Metro which is at UNO. This is a major meet, so if you are around UNO please come support us, perhaps bringing us food (like more waffles). We are having the most successful season of all time, and it will be even more amazing when we break our all-time record number of fans in the stands- 8. Anyway we are proud to be swimming for Newman and we will keep on bringing in the W’s!