Marmion wins 7th straight Block Relays

It's easy to look at Marmion's 140-92 victory in the Randy Block Memorial Relays and think the Cadets must not have felt very pressured on Saturday.

But in its own way, the meet provided some high expectations that Marmion had to try to maintain. The meet is the Cadets' annual invitational and Saturday was the 40th time the school has hosted the meet. Marmion carried a six-year victory streak into the meet and was the top seed in nearly all the events.

At meeting those expectations, the Cadets did very well. They failed to win four of the 12 events Byron won the 200-yard medley relay and the 400 freestyle relay, Lyons won the 100 freestyle relay and Rockford Boylan won the 1-minute relay, where the 100 relay quartet that comes closest to 1 minute wins.

“When you're in that situation where you're favored, you don't want to go and lay an egg,” Marmion coach Bill Schalz said. “You do want to go and perform, just like in any other meet. We low-key this meet a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's a meet and you want to race well.”

But other than that, the meet belonged to Marmion, which was dominant from start to finish.

“It was really tough to swim good times because we're really tired from practicing,” Marmion senior Andy Healy said. “We're about to start Winter Break and we have finals (next week.) To step up and race is really hard.”

The Block Relays take place in an absolute blink of an eye. The meet started at 9 a.m. and the last of the dozen races finished before 10:30 and that was with two breaks to space out the meet just a little more.

“We like this meet a lot,” Healy said. “It's a good way to see where you are at this point and see what you have to improve on.”

In years past. The Block Relays have taken place on the Saturday after finals. This year, finals start on Monday.

“Usually this is a kind of ‘have fun' meet right after finals and right before Christmas training,” Schalz said. “We still had fun. It's an early-season meet where we want to have fun and do some racing. And I wanted them to race hard and work on relay exchanges.”

Schalz said this year's team is well-positioned for swimming well in an invitational such as Saturday's, where swimmers could compete in three events.

“We are a much deeper team than we have been in the past,” Schalz said. “We don't have superstars yet on this team. We might end up with a couple. Most of our guys are going to have to work to get to state. But we have three guys in every event who could qualify for state.”