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This year the swim team won’t have their own pool due to construction, and will use the pool at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School across town to practice. According to senior Kayleigh Svensson, they believe that the unavailability of the Paly pool will not affect the team’s performance.
“We have our pool at JLS, and we do dryland at Paly,” Svensson said. “Aside from the short drive, it hasn’t affected us that much.”
Junior Andrew Jozefov said that the boys’ team placed second at the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League Championship last year, but was not happy with its third place finish at the Central Coast Section Championship.
“We went on to get third at CCS which is not at all where we would have liked to have finished” Jozefov said. “We felt as though we had a great team that could have won it all.”
On the girls’ side, Svensson said that the girls last year did really well, placing second in CCS. She believes that they will have yet another strong season.
“Last season went really well, our girls scored second at CCS,” Svensson said. “This season we’ve got a solid team and we’ve been training hard and should do well.”
Girl swimmers to look out for this season include sophomores Zoe Lusk and Claire Lin, juniors Grace Zhao and Haley Chalmers and senior Katie Francis. For the boys, swimmers to look out for include freshmen Aaron Kuo and Marcus Hong.
With these swimmers Jozefov believes that the boys’ team will have a strong showing and will challenge Bellarmine for the first place in CCS, which Bellarmine has won 31 years in a row.
“This season we have an even better chance at winning CCS,” Jozefov said. “It will be a tough task to beat Gunn in Leagues, but in CCS we have our sights on taking down Bellarmine and ending their 31 year winning streak.”
The Palo Alto High School swim team will be kicking off its season with the first league meet at 3:45 p.m. tomorrow at Homestead High School.