At day 2 and 3 of the BC AA Championships this past weekend, our athletes continued to perform very well.  Overall our swimmers made  this AA Championships one of our most succesful AA's to date.  On Saturday night our relays were simply outstanding!  Our 12 & unders girls and boys both won gold while our 13-14 girls earned the silver and the boys won the bronze in very tight races.  The Rapids were dominate on Saturday winning multilpe events if not placing  in the top 3.  A swim of the night for the team was defenitely Michaal Guo's 200 Breastroke.  Having improved 9 seconds in the preliminaries he then dropped another 10 in the final.  At the 100 Michael split was better than his 100 personal best time and then finshed with a time of 2:47.74.  This time not only qualified him for AAA's but was also 3 seconds off the Age Group Nationals cut.  The closest competitior to Michael was teammate Brian Leung who had an awesome race himself.  Brian won the silver medal with a time of 3:00.32, 4 seconds ahead of the 3rd place swimmer. Arvin Chua of RD 2 continued to be on fire on Saturday night too.  3 races, 3 GOLD MEDALS!!  Enough Said.

On Sunday the last event of the competition was the 400 IM.  The 400 IM is considered the hardest event by many and to have it on the last day makes it even tougher.  In the 400 IM and 400 FR only the top 4 swimmers in each age group from preliminaries can qualify for finals.  Ada Zhang, Nicole Welsh and Mackenzie McCord each qualified in their respective age groups. Ada pulled away in the back and breastroke legs to win the gold by 6 seconds!  Nicole fought hard gaining the lead going into the freestyle leg but was out touched in the end and won the silver. Mackenzie had an awesome breastroke leg to climb back into the race and earned the bronze medal. All 3 girls also swam in the 100 BR and 200 BK finals minutes before the 400 IM final making their performances even more impressive.

Overall the Rapids had an amazing weekend.  The team swam 75% personal best times, had many finalists, medalists and our team came home with 6 new BC AAA Qualfiers!  The qualifers are Matthew Crawford (9), Ada Zhang (12), Jerry Liu (12), Nicole Welsh (13), Emma Letts (13) and Michael Guo (14).  A special thanks goes to our awesome chaperones Jaqueline Chua, Tammy Letts & Wendy Berry.  The team would also like to thanks Michelle Jones and Danica Balen for their help and support during the weekend as well.  Below are the medal winners from Saturday and Sunday.

Gold Medals

100 FR - Emma Letts, Arvinc Chua, Jerry Liu

200 BR - Ada Zhang, Mackenzie McCord, Michael Guo

100 FLY - Arvin Chua, Jerry Liu

100 BR - Michael Guo

400 IM - Ada Zhang

Silver Medals

Alex Tsui (100FR, 200 FR), Brian Leung -200BR, Nicole Welsh - 100 Fly, 200BK, 400 IM, Ada Zhang 100BR, Richard Rakchtis - 200BK, Jerry Liu 200BK.

Bronze Medals

Michael Guo 100 FR, Emma Letts 100 Fly, Mackenzie McCord 400 IM