Happy Holidays from Pioneer Swimming!

This year the swim team decided on a combined-holiday event for the annual winter party and called it “Thanksmas.” This tough-to-score invite included a home cooked dinner and white elephant gift exchange to rival all others. Zac opened his home to the team for a great evening of laughter and good food just before Finals began.

Our swimmers are now spread around the globe with loved ones and I trust they fall asleep each night with visions of winter training (and our California trip!) dancing in their heads. We’ll be back together again soon!

November..... meet December!

Invite over, calm returns to our pool

Just in time for a well-earned, much-sought-after Thanksgiving break, the Northwest Invitational is behind us. Strong swimming and so much competition has left us both fired-up for the rest of our season and a little drained. There is nothing like a national holiday to put the pep back into your step.

Here you see Josh Spegman after his 7th place finals swim in the 200 Freestyle. Take my word for it, he is way more excited about his lifetime best swim than he lets on in this priceless candid. And in Rachael’s top five best things about championship swim meets has to be medals with centers that spin.

We’re two weeks from our last dual meet of the term, but first our thoughts turn to family or friends for the holiday this week.

Record-breaking night of finals!

Our team’s swim, nay, the swim of the night, came with Rachael’s victory in the 100 yard freestyle. She lopped more time off her top-seeded swim from prelims and notched her first Lewis & Clark school record in the process. This coach believes she’s only scratched the surface of what she can accomplish in our sport.

Rachael continued the women’s team’s recent record-setting trend as she edged ahead of alumni Nikoya Collier’s mark set last season at the Conference Championship.

A solid night of racing all around. Great relay splits tonight and strong swims. Cat’s powerful 200 Backstroke earned her 2nd place overall and she now owns the second best time in the Northwest Conference this season.

Freshmen Josh and Sam both made second swims in their 500s and showed us the future of Pioneer distance swimming is bright.

Kira rightly described our team’s spirit as, “The cheering-est!” Let’s do it again tomorrow!

Day One prelims, in the book

We return to the pool for Finals in less than two hours. This morning saw strong races, LOUD cheering, and one top seed going into our first night of finals. Below are a few pictures of last night’s preparation and how the team got ready for today.

Hosting the biggest meet of Fall semester!

A short twelve hours from now nineteen collegiate swimming programs (nine men’s and ten women’s) descend on Zehntbauer Swimming Pavilion for the Northwest Invitational. Teams from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California will soon grace our pool and fast swimming is in our future.

Our new spectator seating may well reach capacity and the pool that lays quiet now will erupt with cheers, applause, and the thunderous swims of 262 student-athletes. Join us in person or in spirit from wherever you are with a rousing, “Go Pios!”

Turkeys crash swim workout, mayhem ensues

Thanksgiving-fever (if there is such a thing) has certainly hit the swim team. Teammates Hannah Frank and Rachel Wolf spent a goodly part of their Sunday last weekend making cookie-candy turkeys for Monday swim practice.

Said Hannah, “It was really fun in the beginning, putting them together, but by the time you get to number twenty….”

First Travel Meet!

Our first away meet of the season is always a great adventure. I have to say, I was excited to see there was so much positive energy and chatter on the charter bus that no one even wanted to put a movie on for the trip.

The first night saw us take on the rest of the Northwest Conference in the annual 8th Sprint Pentathlon. Swimmers compete in a 100 IM followed by 50s of each stroke, for a total combined time. Certainly a format that lends itself well to the prototypical sprinter, but I’ve long held the belief that every single athlete can benefit from focusing on the fine points of each swim, supporting his or her teammates, and reveling in the racing environment. And this is what I saw last weekend!

Times are kept by event and by cumulative overall time. Freshman Rachael Cazden, from Boulder, won the 50 Freestyle in a field of about 120 women. She finished the meet our highest placing swimmer at 5th overall. Way to go! Rachael also moonlights as a hair stylist to her teammates and other notable celebrities as seen below.

Freshman breaststroke/sprinter Shuichi Matsumoto (pictured below as a breaststroker and also farther down as The Fly) lapped up the sprint opportunities and found himself our highest placing male at 12th over the whole slate of events.

We saw motivating swims from so many kids and great enthusiasm across the board. It’s impossible not to feel like we are headed in a great direction.

As it was, the direction we headed after the Pentathlon at PLU was across town to UPS for the Relay meet. Another “non-standard” format—this one with unusual relays and a lot of excitement.

Among many awesome swims, our most spectacular race came in the Mixed 200 Free Relay. Rachael, Gail, Shuichi, and Noah blazed through the sprint co-ed relay to a 2nd place overall finish.

Let’s be honest, these meets sometimes stretch on and it’s good to have time for a laugh...

And so ends another week in Pioneer Swimming.

Alumni Swim Meet and Homecoming Weekend!

Pioneer swimmers from years past joined us in Zehntbauer today for the annual Alumni Swim Meet. We had swimmers from the 70’s laughing, racing and cheering alongside recent grads and current swimmers.

This meet could loosely be described as unorthodox, but this takes nothing away from the serious competition and hard-fought races.

Just before the meet, alums gathered to throw a cheer at the varsity and then throw some water in their direction, as well.

Relay power!

Victory dance..?

And to top it all off, the football team won their Homecoming game 57-35 this afternoon? And several swimmers joined the horde in rushing the field when the clock ran down.

Where in the world are Susie, Kim, Catherine and Lee?

The short answer: Greece. Following text by Susie Trexler:

As you may have heard, we took a class this month called Attic Tragedy that involved reading (a LOT) and the performance of one play, The Suppliants (Aeschylus). This performance was last night. Lee took a leading role as the sole Greek, Pelasgus and the three of us are members of the chorus of Egyptian suppliants running away to Greece. The costume of the chorus was all black and I was seamstress and sewed our sashes which were of varying colors.

You can't see it very well but everyone we walked past on the way to school could: we all had Egyptian eye make-up.

An hour after the show found most of us in the library working on our papers (due today) and I can only imagine how that looked to anyone who didn't realize what was going on.

We're off to Lesbos tomorrow for four weeks; it's a rather large island off the coast of Turkey. Swimming? I hope so.

Study, swim and………. Fall out of a raft.

Freshman swimmer Kallie Smith is already leading raft trips with L&C’s College Outdoors program. With an Alaskan’s flair for adventure and the outdoors, she guides other fearless students on Oregon’s Deschutes River. And sometimes falls in. Our thanks to Kallie for supplying these photos and for coming back to us in one piece!

Early morning, good cause, cool shirts!

Last weekend the swim team volunteered as course marshals for Portland’s Susan G. Komen for the Cure. For the fourth year in a row, the roadblocks were guarded and the race course made safe by our fine young men and women in what has become a September team tradition.

Beach Trip!

Note their excitement over getting to pet the cows at Noah’s house!

PIO FAIR 2009 !

Last Friday campus bloomed with annual autumn Pio Fair festivities. Greek food this year, dozens of campus clubs prospecting for new members and a football field full of games and inflatable bounce areas.


Many of our varsity sports teams put on activities for students and families. Since no one would let us dig a trench in the field to have swimming races (did anyone see that Myth Busters with Nathan Adrian?) the team decided the only reasonable option was a water balloon toss. This did not disappoint. People who were exceptionally drenched in this game: Dinari Foreman (Associate Men’s Basketball Coach), Shawna Feldt (Head Softball Coach), our own Matt Yelin, and so many more…