Girls’ swim (0-2) lost 99-71 to University High on Mar. 20 at the pool deck. Despite its second loss in league, the team pushed through and head coach, Kellie Lawicki said the team was satisfied with its performance.

“I knew it was going to be tough because all the other Irvine schools have seniors and stuff like that, but it’s been a pretty good time,” junior Gabi Taylor said. “We haven’t been pretty far off from other teams and we have a chance to do pretty well in [Pacific Coast League].”

Going into the meet, the team knew opposing the Trojans would be tough. Regardless, the swimmers focused on improving personal times rather than beating the times of their competitors.

“We knew that Uni was a really strong team to race against, and that we also had our own strengths as a team. So going into it, we just wanted to make sure that we weren’t making any beginner mistakes like missing our events or getting disqualified for any events,” co-captain and junior Eden Yeh said. “We just wanted to make sure that we were doing the best that we could.”

The team reached its goal of improving the basics as they did not miss as many events as previous meets, and many swimmers beat personal records. Despite going into the season knowing the competitiveness of their opponents, the swimmers have approached each race and meet by attempting to improve step by step. For future meets, each swimmer is focusing on shaving off seconds in order to make CIF time.

“PCL is consistently one of the top leagues in CIF division one, so we know we have big shoes to fill. Our expectations were to race, learn and have fun throughout the meet,” Lawicki said. “These last two meets we’ve done a great job at controlling the controllables: not letting the other team get in our heads, fighting until the end of the race, we out-touched Uni in quite a few races by a few one-hundredths, and just having fun.”