Barrington wins St. Charles North invite

With two weeks before most boys swim conference meets take place, many teams are about to thin their competitive schedules and concentrate on preparing for the championship meets that take place in February.

But as it has been for much of the last decade. St. Charles North’s boys invitational is one of the final highlights of the local swim season.

This year, Barrington came in, built a 40-point lead in the first third of the meet and held on for a 281-261 victory over the host North Stars.

“We enjoy coming to the St. Charles meet because it’s a good mix of teams,” Barrington coach John Valentine said. “It really prepares us well for the MSL conference meet coming up.”

Valentine said Saturday’s success came thanks to a variety of factors, one of which was a strong Christmas training period.

“That really helped us physically and mentally prepare us for the last six weeks of the season,” Valentine said. “The next six weeks for us are very intense. Over the holidays, even though we had two-a-day practices, we still had a chance to have a lot of fun.”

Valentine said his team did some cross training in a manner that many swim teams don’t, and he felt the results were positive.

“We took the boys out cross country skiing one morning after a big snow and that was kind of fun,” Valentine said. “Some of them have never been on skis before so that was a lot of fun. We played a lot of basketball and let’s say I’m glad they’re swimmers. But the difference in us over the last six weeks is really big.”

Valentine said depth was also key to his team’s success on Saturday. Each team was allowed four entries in individual events.

“We came in 2-3 or 2-4 even in events we didn’t win,” Valentine said. “We were right there the whole meet.”

Valentine singled Alex Anderson for his strong overall day of swimming.

“He’s a senior captain who swam really well today on backstroke and contributed on two relays,” Valentine said. “He’s done a nice job for us all season. And some of our “B” swimmers, like James Rodney, stepped up today too.”

St. Charles North rallied after falling behind early and North Stars swimmers started checking the meet scores by the midpoint of the competition. But sometimes, teams dig themselves too large a hole, and that happened to the North Stars on Saturday.

“We came in and we were pretty confident as a team,” St. Charles North junior Kyle Gannon said. “We thought we were going to win the meet easily. We came in and we lost focus on the goal of winning the meet.”

Gannon was St. Charles North’s lone individual event winner when he finished first in the 500 freestyle.

“I looked at the seedings and I was seeded first so I felt confident,” Gannon said. “We’ve been working on my turns this past week. I felt good about my turns until the last 100, when I was feeling really tired. I kind of died at the end, but I was happy with my time.”

The North Stars also claimed first place in the 200 freestyle relay and the 400 freestyle relay as they attempted to retrieve the meet. But Barrington’s strong start was too much for the North Stars to overcome.

“We did a pretty good job today,” St. Charles North coach Rob Rooney said. “Barrington had a great meet today. They came in and they were ready to swim. To be honest, they probably caught our coaching staff and our swimmers a little off-guard.”

Rooney said he shook up his lineup some for the meet in an effort to answer some questions still remaining as the conference-sectional-state sequence nears.

“I’m not going to lie; I’ll take the blame for the loss,” Rooney said. “I got a little cute with the lineup today. I wanted to see the kids swim some different races. From my position, that was perhaps my fault. But I also wanted to see some swim-off spots for conference. So we’ll take it for what it is.”

Still, Rooney said his team hadn’t performed poorly.

“We swam different orders in the relays and had some different twists that I wanted to see things with,” Rooney said. “The outcome is what it is. But we got some final decisions made for conference for junior-varsity spots, which we needed answered.”