In sports, a team’s coaching staff strives to have the team competing at its peak performance when the stakes are highest. For The Hill School swimming and diving team, the culminating event that the team spends the season building toward is the Eastern Interscholastic Swimming and Diving Championship, a season-ending event featuring more than 40 prep swimming teams from the East Coast. 

On Friday morning, team members entered Franklin and Marshall College’s Kunkel Aquatic Center, site of the Championship, optimistic about the odds of continuing to build on the success of the previous weekend’s MAPL Championship. When the final event concluded on Saturday night, The Hill’s swimming and diving record books were rewritten. A total of eight new records were set during the two-day event as The Hill boys’ finished eighth, the girls’ eleventh, and as a combined group the team finished in sixth place overall (combined team finish is a new category this year). 

“The coaches and I are ecstatic about the performance of the team at the Easterns meet,” said The Hill’s Director of Aquatics, Amy Agnew. “We had more kids qualify for finals than years past, we broke six records on the boys’ side and two on the girls’ side, and earned sixth place as a combined team. After a challenging dual meet season, our athletes trusted the process and swam above and beyond everyone’s expectations. I am especially proud of how our sixth formers came together and fed off each other’s energy to show what a smaller, focused team can do in a challenging competition.” 

It did not take long for the first school record to fall. In just the third event, the women’s 200 free prelims, Brigid Donnelly ’19 touched the wall in 1:55.79, breaking the eight-year old record in the event; Donnelly would lower her own record in the finals later that day en-route to a 12th place finish. 

The men’s 200 free school record also fell on Friday evening when Alfonso Mestre ’19 swam a 1:38.79 to best the previous record set by Ryan Owens ’16 by half of a second. Mestre also lowered his own school record in the 500 free, which he set last year, to earn a third place finish in the event. His 500 free time of 4:26.73 meets the Long Course Junior Championship qualification time.

Moments before Mestre bested his own record in the men’s 500 free, Kiersten Dagg ’22 set a new record in the women’s 500 free, narrowly breaking the record set by Emily Glinecke ’16 in 2013. Dagg impressively shaved nine seconds off of her preliminary time in her record-breaking swim. 

The final individual record set during the weekend came from Michael Wong ’21 in the 100 back. Wong tied the school record in the preliminary round before trimming three-tenths of a second in the final to inscribe his name in the school record books.

Three relay records were broken throughout the weekend, including one that had stood for 37 years. In the first men’s final on Friday, the 200 Medley, the relay team of Wong, Matthew Kenvin ’20, Yeob Kim ’19 and Michael Schiavone ’19 won the “B” Final in a time of 1:35.68 to break the previous record, which was set in 1982. 

Lastly, the foursome of Mestre, Kim, Schiavone, and John Nelligan ’19 broke both the 200 Free and 400 Free Relay records. Coincidentally, both of the previous records were set in 2015 by relays featuring Alberto Mestre ’17 and Chris Schiavone ’16, older brothers Alfonso Mestre and Michael Schiavone. The relay won gold in the 200 Free in a time of 1:22.79, which meets the All-American qualification standard. While the foursome had to settle for fourth in the 400 Free Relay, the time of 3:02.99 also met the All-American standard.