2024 Vancouver Island Regional Highlights

Pacific Coast Swimming drove up to Comox today for Vancouver Island Regionals, with over 75 PCS swimmers competing over the next three days. Friday started off with our distance events, where we started off with Owen Schroeder qualifying for Provincials in the 800m freestyle placing 1st, followed by Eden Blaind who qualified for Divisionals in the 800m freestyle and placed first. Ada Chen placed first in the 11-12 800m freestyle, nearly missing provincials by a second. Brandon Zhang placed first in the 1500m freestyle and qualified for 13-14 Provincials. In our second session of the day, Eleanore Fairhurst qualified for Divisionals in 50m breaststroke, followed by Ezra Safnuk who also qualified for Divisonals in 50m breaststroke, as did Ari Stamhuis collecting another Divisional time. Juliana Roper also qualified for Divisionals in 50m breaststroke as a new 11-12 year old swimmer. Katie McLaren also placed 1st in the 50m breaststroke with a new Provincial Qualfiying time. Zoe Leong placed 1st in the 200m backstroke and qualified for Provincials, followed by Averie Hill who placed 1st in the 200m Indivudual Medley with a new Provincial Qualifying time.

Saturday brought more qualifying times and tons of podium swims for PCS. Our 200m freestyle swimmers brought in 3 new Divisional qualifying times for Lucia White, Katie McLaren and Derek Francois. Zoie Bhatti collected another Provincial qualifying time in 100m butterfly, followed by Ari Stamhuis who collected another Divisional qualifying time in the 100m fly. Eleanore made another Divisional qualifying time in the 200m breaststroke, followed by Noah Zhang who collected another Provincial qualifying time in the 200m breast. Averie Hill qualified for Provincials in 50m backstroke with a time of 34.95. We hd 5 new swimmers qualify for Divisionals in the 400m Individual Medley, including Ada Chen, Zoe Leong, Elodie Chernenkoff, Katie McLaren, and Ari Stamhuis. On the 10&under side, Derek Francois collected 2 more Divisional time standards both in the 50m breast with a time of 43.32, and in 200m IM with a time of 2:58.64. Lukas Schroeder made is his first 2 Divisional qualifying times in the 100m freestyle with a time of 1:13.53, and in the 50m back with a time of 38.58. 

On Sunday,