Alberta Provincial Trials - Meet Write Up

Alberta Provincial Trials was the first provincial meet in so long that there were so many athletes attending a meet that size for the first time. Teams from every corner of the province descended on Repsol for three days of short course racing. Trials is awesome because it is the last chance for athletes to qualify for Alberta Champs. There are two ways to qualify for Champs from trials. The first is get two Champs times. The second is to win an event. The racing was fast and in almost every event the winning time was under the Champs standard. Dinos started punching their tickets to Edmonton right out of the gate on Friday with timed finals in 400 IM and 400 Free. Additionally, Elijah O’Reilly swam right through his send Champs time to get his Western in 50 Free punching his tickets to two new meets in one race.

The Saturday finals session is where it really started to get exciting with so many fast races tightly contested. It was awesome to see the way the team got behind big swims and really cheered people on to wins. On Saturday night we had 5 individual wins with many others collecting Champs times along the way to contested finishes.

Sunday really started to feel like last chance for lots of swimmers. We had three more wins. We also had some incredible races for athletes that just came up shy of the win. It is such a tremendous format as athletes are faced with immense weight placed on a win. For many athletes at the meet that is an uncommon thing. Of course, everyone wants to win but improving individual times is the typical focus of racing. The chances that athletes are willing to take for a win versus a best time is so fun to watch. Specifically in 200’s there was people letting it all hang out right from the start. Sometimes they were bettered by an amazing race from a competitor, and sometimes they just could not quite hold the speed the risk almost always was rewarded with an incredible individual best time.

In the end almost all who risked were rewarded in some way and the Dinos were tough right through the weekend. It was awesome to see so many athletes get through to Champs filling out the squad headed to Edmonton.