Sports : Viking swimmers set personal best times at Grinnell

On Saturday the Vinton-Shellsburg swimmers travelled to Grinnell to participate in the Tiger Invitational. Despite finishing sixth in the seven team field it was a great day across the board as the Vikings turned in their strongest single-meet performance in the past couple of years. Eight ranked Linn-Mar won the meet in dominating fashion, beating second place Des Moines East by nearly 200 points.

During the meet the Viking swimmers hit the water 39 times. Of those 39 efforts, 30 resulted in new personal best marks. Having nearly 80 percent of the events result in new best times is amazing, but the amount of time dropped in a number of events was also quite impressive. Freshmen Dylan Geater, Tyler Heckel and Lewis Williams competed in a combined seven varsity events and turned in seven new personal best times. Geater had three new bests including a drop of six seconds in his 50 Free and more than 9 seconds in the 100 Free. Sophomore Ryan Levis led the team with a perfect four personal best times in his four races. Fellow Sophomores Alex Dick and Ben Eden also had very nice days registering three new personal bests each.

Top ten individual performances for the Vikings included 7th place finishes for Seniors Anthony Dickerson in the 50 Free and Kyle Schemmel in the 500 Free. Schemmel dropped more than 15 seconds in the event to finish at 7:01.09. Dickerson also finished 9th in the 500 Free. Senior Matt Upmeyer had an amazing 7 second drop in the 100 Back to finish 9th with a time of 1:13.28.

This Friday the Vikings will be back in action at Luther College in Decorah where they will face Decorah and Waterloo East in what will be their final meet until January.

See complete results HERE.