Girls High School National Championships: Michigan magic

Swimming World and Junior Swimmer, Aug 2003 by Morales, Tito

Ann Arbor Pioneer High School became the first girls' team in Michigan's illustrious swimming history to win Swimming World's prestigious national high school title.

Some things in life just seem to be a given. It's a given, for instance, that every summer the Yankees will compete for the pennant, Hollywood will release one or two big budget snoozers, and a girls' high school team from one of the two coasts will win Swimming World's national championship.

Since the magazine first devised a system for determining an overall high school champion in the mid-1970s, the balance of power has pretty much always teetered between California and Florida. Entering the season, in fact, those two states had captured 15 of a possible 22 titles (separate championships for public and independent schools were held five times during the 1980s).

But in competitive swimming, nothing is ever a given. Just ask Ann Arbor Pioneer.

Pioneer rewrote the record books by becoming the first girls' team in Michigan's illustrious swimming history to win the prestigious national title.

"There has been some good swimming here," Coach Denny Hill says, reflecting back upon his 35 years with Pioneer, "but this team was different right from the very beginning. We knew we had a special group of girls, but you just never know how things will turn out."

Led by Swimming World's Female High School Swimmer of the Year, Kara Lynn Joyce, Pioneer captured the magazine's coveted crown with 138 points. Two-time defending champion Irvine High School from Southern California finished with 128.5 points, and Bowie, in Arlington, Texas, made it a clean sweep for the public school category by rounding out the top three with 103.5.

The Right Mix

Pioneer, long a force at the state level, won secondary school swimming's ultimate bragging rights with a blend of seasoned veterans and precocious underclassmen who displayed an uncanny ability to rise to the occasion during their biggest meet of the season.

"I've been a part of high school teams in the past," says Joyce, who enrolled at Pioneer after moving from New York before her junior year. "But high school swimming is really, really big here in Michigan."

Unlike many programs where the swimmers do the bulk of their training with club teams and only gather under the school's banner during meets, Pioneer's 80 athletes practiced together as a group all season long.

"We were all going through the same things together, with classes and double workouts," says Joyce. "And I think that really brought us together."

Competition was lively for the squad from the first day of practice, and the knowledge that there was to be an increase in the number of scorers at the state championships-from 12 to 16-seemed to add extra incentive for all the swimmers to want to contribute. Additionally, witnessing Joyce's rapid improvement firsthand inspired everyone on the team to push harder to realize their own goals.

Entering the 2002-03 season, though, most experts were picking Irvine to pull off a three-peat-and for good reason, as the Vaqueros had lost only one Top 16 point scorer from their title team of the year before.

But Ann Arbor's purple-and-white-clad gang had other plans as they traveled across county to Eastern Michigan University for the weekend of Nov. 22-23, 2002.

"Going into the state meet, everyone had high expectations," Joyce says. "Our coach told us we were one of the best teams he ever had, and that really pumped us up to want to do well."

Whatever transpired on that bus ride to Ypsilanti worked, because the meet turned out to be one of those surreal peak experiences that coaches and swimmers dream about.

"It was magical in more ways than one," says Hill.

The tone was set in the prelims when Joyce, Margaret Kelly, Leigh Cole and Jennifer Merte took to the blocks in the 200 yard free relay. Joyce led off, and her astonishing 22.04 destroyed the national high school record.

"When Kara hit the wall after the first leg, we all thought the scoreboard was broken," Hill says.

It wasn't. But the 50 freestyle record was-by almost 6-tenths of a second. And the breakage didn't stop there. Kelly, Cole and Merte continued to pour it on, one length at a time. Their efforts produced a sparkling 1:32.77-nearly two full seconds faster than the national record.

The relay had averaged 23.19 per leg. That a school could lay claim to a sprinter the likes of Joyce was an aberration; that the same student body possessed another trio whose skills weren't far behind almost borders on the criminal.

Just Getting Started

For Pioneer, though, things were only getting started.

There were some questions about the 200 medley relay, the first event of the finals, because the team of Kelly, Ilene Lesch, Melissa Jaeger and Ally Wyatt included only two returnees from the previous year's state record-setting squad. But when the foursome came within 1-hundredth of equaling their record, it was clear that Pioneer was literally off to the races and wouldn't look back.

At the heart of the unstoppable storm was Joyce, whose performance sent a shudder through the record books.