Conant pools its efforts, claims outright West title

With an outright Mid-Suburban West championship at stake Friday at Conant, it was gut-check time after diving had been completed, with the meet against Fremd tied at 39-39.

The Vikings got they boost they were looking for in the second race after diving, the 100-yard freestyle, as junior Dustin Anderson and senior Sean Gonzalez came up with a 1-2 finish ahead of Conant standout Ryan Chiero.

Unfortunately for Fremd, that was about the last hurrah as Conant came up with a string of exceptional races to take command in the meet's latter stages and earn a 991/2-861/2 victory.

The Cougars completed an unbeaten dual-meet run against MSL opponents and earned their first divisional title since 2000, also the year they most recently won an overall MSL crown.

It was a fitting way to wrap up the league dual schedule, as this meet had everything: Loud fans, quality swims, interesting lineup strategy, and even ties - two of them.

Conant senior Will Landgren and Fremd freshman Dennis Kostidis went virtually stroke-for-stroke for 20 laps and touched at precisely the same time in the 500-yard freestyle, 5:02.17. Earlier, Fremd and Conant split the fifth-place point in the 100 butterfly.

"I don't think I can remember having two ties over the course of a whole season," said Conant coach Brian Drenth. "Then, to have it happen twice in the same meet, it's just really unusual. You know in a meet like this that a bunch of the races are going to go down to the fingernails. I'm glad we didn't trim ours.

"This was just a great, great meet. "

Landgren, after completing his exhausting 500, had only a couple of minutes of recovery time before delivering a key leg on Conant's winning 200 freestyle relay, which edged Fremd by three-tenths of a second.

There were plenty of positives for Fremd: Kostidis edged Chiero to win in the 200 IM, Gonzalez and Tony Rublaitis came up with a 1-2 finish in the 50 free and Jeff Freund won the 200 free, the 100 fly and had a solid anchor leg on the winning 400 free relay.

"A lot of our guys did a good job of stepping up," said Fremd coach Nicole LaBeau. "I do have a very young, inexperienced varsity team. In high school duals, it's not just about your time, it's also about racing and points. Some of our guys are still learning that."

So, thanks to a strong finish that included a 1-3-5 in the 100 backstroke led by David Wollschlager (59.25) and a 1-3-4 in the 100 breaststroke led by Victor Lim (1:05.63), it was Chiero and his teammates who were celebrating after the meet.

Cougars diver John Maevski also delivered his best score of the year, a 200.80 to win by a slim margin over Fremd's Mike Kowalenko (198.30).

"That's the biggest thing," Chiero said.

"I did terrible today - well, maybe not terrible, but subpar - but this is a team we have here. Everybody contributed, and you need everybody to win."