FEDERAL WAY — Shelby Lee has never considered himself a 200-yard freestyle swimmer, and in fact, the Kamiak senior almost didn’t swim the event at state this year.
Fortunately for Lee and the Knights, he and his coach did decide to get him into the 200-free in Kamiak’s final dual meet, because he won the event at the class 4A state meet Saturday, helping the Knight’s to a third-place finish in the team competition. Joining Lee with strong showings for Kamiak were senior Eben Schumann, who was second in both the 50-yard free and 100-yard free, and junior Henry Limm, who was third in the 500-yard free and fifth in the 200-yard individual medley.
“Throughout my whole high school career I’ve never really considered the 200-free one of my best events,” said Lee, who also set a school record in the 100-free with his leadoff leg of the day’s final relay, breaking the mark established by Schumann just minutes earlier. “But this year it started feeling like one of my better events and throughout the year it just got better and better for me, so I just decided to go for it and see what happens.”
As Kamiak coach Chris Erickson described it, Lee swimming the 200 was “A last-second decision. He wasn’t in it until the last meet of the year.”
With Lee, Schumann and Limm leading the way, the Knights finished with 175 points, just behind Newport (199) and Camas (185) in a team competition that went down to the final few events.
“We were hoping to be top five,” said Erickson, whose Knights finished 10th last year after winning state three times in the previous five years. “We were in the mix, it was exciting. This is our focus, and we wanted to swim our very best here, and almost without exception we did.”
Lee, who won the 200-free in 1:41.17, also finished third in the 100-yard backstroke with a time of 51.54. Lee describes his relationship with that event as “a love-hate relationship” because it comes right after the 200-yard free relay, an even in which he helped Kamiak to a second-place tie.
“It’s one of my better events, but I have that relay right before, so that takes a lot out of me,” he said.
For Schumann, who finished third in both of his events last year, two second-place finishes represented an improvement, but he didn’t feel the same about both of them. Schumann came into the race feeling like he should win the 50-free, but was edged by just 12 hundredths of a second by Moses Lake’s Madison Molitor. In the 100-free, however, Schumann was excited about his time, which was a personal best, and very briefly a school record before Lee took it.
“I was really disappointed to look up there and see I had gotten second, and that I had added 11 hundredths to my best time,” Schumann said of the 50-free. “I felt that I was positioned to win it, but obviously my finish was slower than the guy in Lane 6. That hurt a lot to see that, but I decided to take that rage, sit on it, let it fester, then I’ll throw it into the 100.”
Schumann didn’t turn that rage into a win in the 100-free, but he did finish second to a very strong performance by Mitchell Crossen of Rogers, who won in 45.97.
“I’m not to mad about that, second place against that kind of time,” Schumann said. “I was thrilled I went under 47 finally, because I was 47.6 last year, 47.4 going into finals this year, so to go to 46.90? Thrilled.”
Jackson, which earlier this year ended Kamiak’s streak of 103 straight wins in dual meets, finished 10th, led by a third-place finish from freshman Jonathan Cook in the 100-yard breaststroke, and two top-eight finishes from senior Conner McGinnis, who was seventh in the 100-yard butterfly and eighth in the 100-yard backstroke. The Timberwolves also finished fifth in the 200-yard medley relay.
Reid wins diving title
Lake Stevens senior Chase Reid came into the state meet as the top seed in the diving competition, but that doesn’t mean he was over-confident coming into the event.
“I was seeded first, but I knew (Newport’s Oey Chang and Woodinville’s Scott Evans) were right behind me, so I wasn’t too confident until (Friday’s prelims) when I built a pretty decent lead. Going into today I was pretty confident.”
Reid put together a second strong day in Saturday’s finals and won the event handily, finishing with 447.85 points, well ahead of Chang, the second-place finisher. Reid had finished fifth each of the past two years and left those state meets feeling like he had underperformed.
“I hit all my dives, which I hadn’t done at state in the years before,” Reid said. “This was by far my best competing at state.”
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