In a sport so rooted in numbers, progressions and predictability, a summer league dual meet rarely follows its given script. There is the score on paper. Then there is the actual meet.
But few could have predicted Saturday’s outcome between Chesterbrook and Overlee, whether by carefully scoring out the seeded meet sheet, or in wildly throwing out guesses.
The three previous meetings were decided by seven points. So picking within 10 points might have been smart. Ten days before this year’s iteration, Chesterbrook won the divisional relay carnival outright for the first time since 2010 by six points, and Overlee responded the following week by winning the All-Star Relay Carnival with 711⅓ points to the Tigersharks’ 680, a close result in the league-wide championships meet.
On paper, this meet was again supposed to be close. On paper, Chesterbrook was supposed to win by a slim margin.
But after Wednesday afternoon’s All-Star Relay victory, Overlee had momentum to carry into the weekend and the end result was the Flying Fish’s second consecutive Division 1 title, a 248-172 decision over their longtime rival.
“I can’t think of how we came to that score in the end,” Overlee Coach Beth Baker said.
It was the largest margin of victory in a deciding meet in the division in 11 years.
“I’ve never experienced a Overlee-Chesterbrook meet like this,” said Suzanne Dolan, an Overlee rising senior, who won the 15-18 girls’ 50-meter breaststroke (33.81 seconds) and 50 fly (29.58). “Normally there are ups and downs, but that didn’t happen this time.”
The Flying Fish won seven of the 10 freestyle events to gain a 20-point lead after the first leg of the meet, and never relinquish the lead.
[McLean crushes a pair of NVSL relay records; Overlee gets one, misses another]
Beth’s son, Ryan Baker, a rising senior for the Flying Fish, won a key race for the Flying Fish as he posted a lifetime-best 23.58 in the 50 free to out-touch Chesterbrook’s Chris Outlaw, a Virginia Tech bound graduate, by .17 seconds and tie himself with McLean’s Andrew Seliskar for the top time in the league this season.
“You could kind of see the way the meet was going,” Ryan Baker said. “We had the spark.”
Event after event, spectators watched as two, sometimes three swimmers touched the wall within a hand of each other, and more often than nought, it was Overlee swimmers with their fingers first to the wall.
But Overlee did more than win close races. Its swimmers created close races where there weren’t supposed to be.
“People that were supposed to get fourth place were winning,” Beth Baker said. “It could not have been a more satisfying experience.”
Megan Day, a senior who had gone sub-37 in 50-meter breaststroke just once before, posted a time of 35.89 to earn second place. Paul Kinsella cut 1.49 seconds off his time in the 13-14 boys’ 50 breaststroke to cruise to second place with a time of 35.12.
The 15-18 boys relay, however, may have been the most surprising race.
After winning by .03 seconds at the divisional relay carnival, the Tigersharks took first place again at All-Star Relays. They won by .73 seconds, removing the question of a timer error.
But beating a team three times in row is difficult, and despite aging up 14-year-old Thomas Outlaw to provide a boost during the butterfly leg and improve their overall time, it wasn’t enough.
The Overlee relay team of Baker, Brady Almand, Jonathan Day and Nicholas Pasternak swam under the league mark with a time of 1:48.32, beating the Chesterbrook relay by nearly a second.
“I didn’t even think about the NVSL record,” Beth Baker said. “I just wanted them to beat Chesterbrook.”
The team will not hold the record, though, as the McLean relay posted a 1:48.16 in the Marlins’ victory over Tuckahoe. The Flying Fish did not leave Saturday record-less, however.
In 8&under boys, Evan Ingraham, Matthew Aslaksen, Rory McNamara and William Weber took down the 100-meter freestyle relay dual meet record from 1992. That record will stand, well clear of the next fastest in the league, with a time of 1:09.10, cutting the record down by more than a half-second.
It won’t be the last record set in this series, just as Saturday’s 76-point rout isn’t likely to hold for more than a year.
“Other than how close the score was, it was the same meet,” Ryan Baker said. ” I just didn’t have to have a heart attack at the end of the meet.”