Anderson wins 100 Free at Conference

The Lady Dogies Swim Team competed well at the 3A East Conference Meet Friday and Saturday in Buffalo. Lydia Anderson won the 100 Freestyle, Raeleigh Shipp punched her ticket to the 3A State Championships by qualifying in the 200 Freestyle, several new personal records were posted, and as a team, head coach Doug Scribner’s squad finished 19 points higher than they did last season.
“We really had a pretty good weekend!” Scribner said. “The highlight, of course, was Lydia winning the 100 and Raeleigh qualifying in the 200.”
Anderson swam two PR’s in the prelims on Friday, first by going 26.54 in her fourth-place finish in the 50 Freestyle and then swimming a 58.23 in her first place win in the 100 Free. Her win also earned her a place on the 3A East All-Conference team.
Shipp swam a good race in the prelims of the 200 Free, however touched the wall just one-tenth of a second short of qualifying.
“We came up to each other after and just started laughing,” Scribner admitted. “I said I couldn’t believe that in eight lengths, you were just
a tenth of a second off! She was
definitely disappointed, but she wasn’t sad.”
“On Saturday, I just said to her that if qualifying time was 2:15, you’d be 2:15.10,” he continued. “So she set her goal to that and she was able to swim against a girl who swam 2:18. By doing that, she moved from 11th to ninth and got under the time.”
Shipp’s time of 2:19.95 was just enough to earn her a trip to Laramie in a couple of weeks. 
“The tough thing about the weekend was that we decided to race our fastest 200 Freestyle Relay team, which only gave Hailey [Beastrom] one heat of rest before she swam the open backstroke,” Scribner described. “She not only didn’t make the top 12 to be able to advance to the finals on Saturday, but she also didn’t swim a qualifying time in the event.”
However, Beastrom swam a PR in her backstroke split in the 200 Medley Relay, so Scribner knows she has the speed to qualify in the 100 Open, and is hoping she will get it done at the Last Chance meet Friday in Gillette.
Other PR’s included Rebekah Olson who had a 7.13 second improvement in the 200 Free, Veronica Ayers who PR’d in the 100 Free by 9.65 seconds and Jaydenn Nelson who took 7.35 seconds off her previous best time in the 500 Free.
“We talked about what they needed to do to make it into the finals, and so they went out and swam really hard,” Scribner said. “They didn’t finish in the top 12, but they had significant time drops, which was great.” 
The Lady Dogies placed seventh in all three relays, so they had to swim alone in finals, which Scribner admitted presented a bit of a challenge. 
“That made it a little hard, but we were consolation champions in all three,” he said. “We also improved our time from last year, and from Friday to Saturday, even though we were swimming alone.”
The 200 Free team of Nelson, Shipp, Olson and Anderson improved the relay time from last season by 20 seconds in the finals with a time of 1:56.26, a second faster than they swam it on Friday.
The 400 Free team of Olson, Nelson, Shipp and Anderson improved on last season’s time by 19 seconds and were about half a second faster than Friday, while the 200 Medley team of Beastrom, Ruth Rose, Kyah Miller and Ayers improved their time from Friday to Saturday by almost nine seconds, and put up a time better than last year where the team disqualified.
This week is the Last Chance Qualifier in Gillette beginning at 4 p.m., where Scribner is hoping to see Beastrom use this last chance to qualify in the 100 Backstroke.