Swim team struggles with low participation, hurting their ability to win meets

Senior Keon Nikfar competes in the 100-yard breaststroke.

The team hopes to send multiple individual swimmers to CCS.

The swim team landed their first win on March 17 with the varsity girls beating Gunn, but the boys have yet to achieve their first victory. So far, they have swum against Los Altos on March 3, Gunn on March 17 and Palo Alto on March 24.

In addition to the swim teams, the diving team — which consists of juniors Tashi Vasudeva and Riley Alves — practices with the Los Gatos team as the school’s swimming pool does not have diving boards and competes for Saratoga on Thursdays while swimmers have competitions on Fridays.

Senior Zeynep Tokuz and freshmen Kelsey Zhang and Emma Geng have already made CCS cut times for the girls in their events, with Zhang even making states in the 200 IM. For the boys only freshman Taewon Yim has qualified for CCS in the 500 free.

As a whole, this year’s team has fewer members than in previous years due to a lack of participation from mainly underclassmen. This not only hurt the boys’ team but also led to not fielding a JV girls’ team. Even with the smaller number of girls, however, junior Meher Bhatnagar said their significant improvements and hitting personal bests have buoyed spirits.

While the girls team has been stronger, senior Channie Hong is hopeful the boys will start earning more points in future meets.

“Many of us are out of shape from last season, especially if we didn’t join a swim club,” Hong said. “Right now, everyone is still trying to not just recover from the off-season but to be faster.”

Lower participation has certainly hurt the boys’ team since they have enough swimmers to fill each of the 12 events in a meet, but have fewer swimmers in each event to earn points compared to other schools — meets are scored based on the number of placers in each event. Still, Hong believes they can overcome this with improvements from the members they do have and achieve some wins.

“We definitely have the potential to beat some of the other teams such as Monta Vista [which also has a smaller team],” Hong said. “I also want to see how many people we can send to CCS and how we do there.”