On Friday and Saturday, February 20-21, The Warren Wilson College Owls swimming teams took a 9th place combined finish while competing in the 2009 Appalachian Swimming Championships held at Marshall University. 

The two-day championship format featured preliminaries in all events, with the fastest 24 swimmers coming back to swim the same events at night in the finals (top 8), consolation finals (9-16th) and the bonus final (17-24th place).

It's unusual to have three heats at night, but this extra "bonus final" heat provided some swimmers the opportunity to improve upon their personal best from their morning swim.  Every WWC swimmer swam season best times, and most swam lifetime best swims.

Leading the way with two new varsity records was freshman Amelia Hubbard (Tobaccoville, NC), swimming to a 6th place finish in the 200 yard Freestyle and smashing the nine-year old record by three-seconds with a time of 2:05.32.  Her 200 yard Butterfly time of 2:29.01 during the preliminaries broke the existing record by seven seconds.  Amelia now owns four Owls varsity records in the 100 and 200 yard Butterfly and the 200 and 500 yard Freestyle.

While no more school records were broken, personal best swims were the theme during each of the four swimming sessions.  Sophomore Johnathan Bland (Raleigh, NC) was just shy of both the 50 and 100 yard Freestyle records, and is closing in on the 100 (5th place, 1:03.38) and 200 yard Breaststroke (9th place, 2:23.13) marks, too, with all events ending in personal bests.

Seniors and co-captains Kenny Hummel and Brendan Burns each swam lifetime bests in the 100 yard Freestyle, as well as the 100 yard Backstroke and 100 yard Butterfly, respectively.  In addition, Brendan swam a huge 200 yard IM (Individual Medley) in the morning that crushed his best time by a large margin.  The two guys provided consistent leadership, comedic relief and fun perspective all season long, enabling the team to gel in a very positive manner.