After losing seven swimmers from his roster at the end of last season, Temple coach Trey Sullivan said he has never dealt with as much turnover from one year to the next. Those departures have resulted in a smaller and younger team in 2017.
“We have three seniors,” Sullivan said. “We’ve got a lot of new-time swimmers that are either freshmen or have never swam before. More than half the team is that. We had an epidemic of kids moving away this year. We had four swimmers move away, and I had three swimmers quit. I’ve never had such a mass exodus.”
Temple didn’t let the unexpected losses short-change its success Friday afternoon at the District 18-5A meet at Hardin Swim Center, as freshman Andreas Schmidt, junior Kashlyn Waggy and senior Madison Sanchez earned district championships to help the boys team place second and the girls squad finish third.
Temple is sending 16 swimmers to the Class 5A Region V meet, which is Feb. 3-4 at the Texas A&M Student Rec Center in College Station. The top six in each event qualified for regionals, and Georgetown won both team titles.
“Andreas dropped 20 seconds,” Sullivan said. “We had four seconds dropped, seven seconds dropped. Pretty much everybody is advancing, so that’s good. Because of that and the light numbers we had, we did real well. I’m very proud of them.”
Click here to read the entire article in the Temple Daily Telegram by Edward Isaacs