The 200-yard medley relay is a perfect mixture of individual talent, group chemistry and having all the required ingredients.
And whenever Dalton High swimmers Taylor Dale, Pierson Scarborough, Omar Farag and Wil Cushman take to the pool, they flow together like a well-made dessert, coach Charles Todd said.
“It’s like a brownie,” he said. “If you don’t have a good mix, it tastes bad. If you don’t have the right mix here, the team swims bad.”
The foursome make up one of six relay teams that will represent Dalton at the Georgia High School Association’s Class A-4A state swim meet in Atlanta, which starts today at Georgia Tech with preliminaries and finishes with finals on Saturday. Dalton has boys and girls relay teams competing in the 200 medley, 200 freestyle and 400 freestyle.
Dale, Scarborough, Farag and Cushman own the No. 1 seed for the boys 200 medley with a qualifying time of 1 minute, 37.45 seconds. For Todd, they’ve become the ultimate example of what makes a great medley relay team.
“On the medley, you have to have all the strokes, so it’s (about getting the right combination),” Todd said. “And it’s something that didn’t happen overnight.”
In contrast to freestyle relays, the medley is a combination of different swimming techniques and forms. Dale is Dalton’s premier backstroker, Scarborough handles the breaststroke, Farag swims the butterfly and Cushman finishes it off in the freestyle. Some teams have trouble finding someone for each stroke, Todd said.
But even for the teams that do, finding the perfect mixture is not automatic.
There is a chemistry factor in play that requires the exchanges — the transition from one swimmer to the next — to be perfect for the quickest time possible.
“With those exchanges, it makes everything faster,” said senior Rebecca Davis, a member of the Lady Catamounts’ 200 medley team.
The exchange is made when one swimmer in the relay finishes his or her leg and the next swimmer springs off the board and into the water. If the new swimmer leaves too early, the team is disqualified. Leave too late and the team loses valuable time.
“As soon as they touch (the wall),” Todd said, “the next swimmer is in the air, and everything but their feet has left the block.”
Dale and Scarborough are juniors, while Farag and Cushman are seniors. As a group, they have the advantage of eight years of training together.
“You’ve got to work together to get your timing down,” Cushman said. “You have to know the other guy’s stroke. So you have to know how many strokes it will take them to get to the wall, and you have to know what they are doing so you don’t go too early or too late.”
While the order of strokes is the same for all teams, having the backstroke go first is good for the Cats, who have Dale in the water. As an individual, Dale is the No. 1 seed for state in the 100 backstroke.
“He can swim the backstroke as fast as a lot of people can swim the freestyle,” Todd said. “So that’s nice for us to start with, because he gets us a lead.”
Next is the breaststroke, which Todd said is “usually the slowest leg” for most teams. That’s followed by the butterfly and the freestyle, traditionally the fastest stroke for any swimmer.
Dale, Scarborough, Farag and Cushman will also swim for the Cats in the 400 freestyle and hold the No. 5 seed for state with a time of 3:20.53. Sophomore Taylor Mathis, senior Brandt Tharpe, junior Michael O’Brien and either Sam Reeves (freshman) or Alan Trejo (junior) will swim the 200 freestyle relay (1:31.26) and are seeded fifth.
Freestyle relay teams are less complicated to put together because the clock does most of the work for coaches. They simply must find the four fastest swimmers.
“You have to have people who are sprint swimmers,” he said. “You have to have a lot of fast-switch (muscle) fiber kids, kids who can jump like cats and swim like fish. If you were a slow-switch fiber kid, you’re probably a distance swimmer.”
Cushman said it has more to do with “brute force” and perfecting the timing of exchanges is not as difficult.
“Everyone is doing the same stroke,” he said, “so it’s not as hard to tell how many strokes it will take.”
For the Lady Cats, freshman Nineve Arriola (backstroke), senior Anna Clarke (butterfly), freshman Maddie Miller (freestyle) and Davis (breaststroke) will team up for the 200 medley (2:05.67), while the same group has a qualifying time of 1:48.62 for the 200 freestyle.
In the 400 freestyle, Arriola, Miller and Clarke will team up with freshman Emilie Smith, having qualified at 4:12.44. Swimmers can only compete in four events at state, including a maximum of two individual events. Todd said Davis is not swimming in the 400 freestyle because she will compete in both the 200 individual medley and the 100 breaststroke in addition to her 200 relay swims.
Northwest Whitfield will send four swimmers to state to compete in one event, the boys 200 freestyle relay. Seniors Sawyer Locke and Nicholas Marcadis, junior Chandler Rickett and sophomore Matthew Pipkin qualified at 1:40.82. Locke, Marcadis and Pipkin competed at state in the same even last year, while Rickett is a new addition.
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