Sports : Viking swimmers win big on Senior Night

Kyle Schmemmel nears the last lap of his 500-yard Freestyle event.

A standing room only crowd, senior night and a tight, competitive meet. Thursday night the fans of Viking swimming were treated to a great show as Vinton-Shellsburg faced Waterloo East at the Braille School pool.

In a meet that couldn’t have been much closer the Vikings came through in the clutch to pull out a 49-45 victory. During the eleven-event meet neither team led at any time by more than 4 points. There were seven ties and four lead changes and the entire meet came down to the final event, with the winner of the 320 freestyle relay taking the meet.

In a meet that close, there were a handful of events and individual races within event that could have flipped the final outcome. No race was closer or more critical than the 160 Free Relay, with the two schools’ A relays seeded less than a second apart. Vinton-Shellsburg’s team of Caleb Kruckenberg, Jordan Evans, Upmeyer and Anthony Dickerson edged East by 8/10ths of a second. Facing a front-loaded East line-up the Vikings quickly fell behind. But lead-off swimmer Kruckenberg may have been the key to winning the race as he held the deficit to a mere 2.5 seconds against East’s two-time state qualifier Tyler Kamp. Evans and Upmeyer closed the gap leaving Dickerson less than a second to make up. Dickerson turned in a the performance the team needed from their three-year letter winning senior, catching East’s swimmer with 10 yards to go and winning by half a body length.

For the culminating winner take all 320 Free Relay, the rapidly improving Vikings hit the water and lead swimmer Caleb Kruckenberg quickly put his team in the lead. Matt Upmeyer and Anthony Dickerson each pulled the team further ahead. By the time anchor swimmer Ryan Levis hit the water Viking fans and swimmers knew they had the win as they cruised to first with a massive 29-second margin.

While not drawing the attention and fanfare of the A relays, the Vinton-Shellsburg B relays were also essential to the win, with the Vikings taking the third place points in all three relays by sizeable margins. Tyler Hekel, Ben Eden, Dylan Geater, Lewis Williams, Alex Dick and Kyle Schemmel all contributed on one or more of those teams. Schemmel also earned a hard-fought second place finish in the 200 Free while Geater and Dick each turned in big time drops to capture much needed third-place points in the 100 Free and 100 Back.

In addition to winning two of the three relays, individual event winners for the evening included Anthony Dickerson in the 100 and 200 Freestyle and Ryan Levis in the 100 Butterfly.

The Vikings return to the pool next Thursday the 22nd in Waterloo against Decorah and Waterloo East.

As the only Wamac Conference school with a boys swim team, the Vikings can (and do) boast that they are again the Wamac Champions -- a fact mentioned on this year's version of the team shirts.

See complete results HERE.

See more photos HERE.