6
Cottage Grove Swimming
Team Rundown:
After two years of consecutively
more swimmers at the state meet,
the Lions are looking to continue
to build on their success. Two years
ago the team brought eight students
and last year, 12. While no one in
that group got out of the qualifying
rounds, there is optimism about the
team.
On the boys side, head coach Ty-
son Pilling is excited to see what his
upperclassmen can bring to the table
this season.
“Really looking forward to how
two of our senior boys do. Joseph
[Pifer] and Ethan [Burleson], it’s their
senior year and they’ll be big players
in our district meet. I’m hoping they
both get qualified for state, we’ll see
how they do at state. And then we
have a junior, Ian Dukes, and he’ll be
a big help for districts and state as
well,” he said.
After graduating some senior girls
that qualified for state, Pilling is ex-
cited about the underclassmen on
the girls team who will be looking to
fill their shoes.
“We have Mikayala as a sopho-
more. And she should be a big help
at our district and state meet and as
far as girls coming out for the sea-
son we have Emma Barlston, which
is Ethan’s sister. It’s her first year of
doing swimming and she’s doing a
great job. Picks it up pretty quick.
But it generally takes a year or two to
kind of develop up before they can
get some big damage going for us,”
said Pilling.
Team Perspective
with Tyson Pilling
On how things are going this year
Great. Really good. We’re up. Our
numbers are up this year, so that’s
great. Yes, more kids out it helps.
Some new kids. Freshman, they’re
doing a great job for their first year.
So it’s exciting.
On the upcoming schedule
First of all, the first meet is not
your traditional setup meet. So it’s
really good to get kids started with
that. It’s a relay meet so they get lots
of exchanges on relays. Relays are
really important at championship
meets, they score double. So they’re
worth good practice and it’s a good
set. Like I said, it takes some of the
pressure away from your first meet.
It’s not your traditional set up.
Then we have our meet at Cot-
tage Grove with North Eugene and
South Eugene. And that will be a
fun one. We’ll have some really fast
swimmers out.
On the goals for the team
Well, always looking at the best
time improvements. Seeing where
you started out. We also do goals and
seeing if we reach our goals. Scoring
at districts, seeing if we placed better
the previous year. So looking for the
best times, the qualifying times ane
measuring up how we did from the
previous year to this year, those are
some of the three things I’ll be look-
ing for and what I want to take as a
win for a good season.
And there’s also, there’s two tro-
phies they hand out. One is sports-
manship and one is the district cham-
pionship and you know I would like
to go for both.
/WWL4]KS3QL[
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