Swimmers, like fine wine, get better with age. But when they are great to begin with, that is something to experience.

The Winona Winhawk Girls Swimmers & Divers travel to Mankato to take on the maturing Mankato West Scarlets. 

Mankato West Swimming & Diving competes in the Big 9 Conference but is a Class A school for Sections and State. So the last meeting involving these two was the 2010 Big 9 Conference Meet. In that Championship meet, the Winhawks had a little more depth and finished in 3^rd and the Scarlets finished 4^th a little ways behind them. Earlier last season, the Winhawks were victorious in a close dual meet winning 96-90.

This year the Winhawks will need to have some swimmers step up to repeat those results. It appears Senior attrition may have hurt the Winhawks more than the Scarlets. 

The Scarlets sent 3 relays and two individual entries to the Class A State meet last year placing 9^th overall. Their 200 and 400 Free Relays will be returning 3 of the 4 competitors from their State entries. If that is not formidable enough, the two individual entries were by the same Scarlet swimmer, Standout Freshman now Sophomore Danielle Nack. Nack finished State in 2^nd place in both the 200 Freestyle and the 500 Freestyle swimming times that make you do a double take at the scoreboard. 

The standout Sophomore is not the only threat the Scarlets possess, starting with Nack’s sister Chantal, a Freshman following in her sister’s wake swimming a 2:04 200 Free and 5:30+ 500 Freestyle. Juniors Samantha Fitzpatrick (1:18 100 Breast) and Nicole Lohman ( 0.25 50 Free and 0.56 100 Free times) will have a definite impact. When you add in Freshman Madison Bacon’s 2:20 200 IM and 1:05 100 Back you have a youthful squad that packs a punch.

Winhawk Coach Steve Burt is still formulating his line-up and learning how the girls developed over the summer. It is hard to predict who will be swimming what, but that is one of the fun parts of high school swimming. It is not about times as much as it is scoring points, so coaches shuffle swimmers looking to score points where they can be found and not give up points by using good swims against better swims.

This will be a great meet and the Scarlets may just avenge their losses of last year. Then again, the Winhawks will definitely have something to say about that and may just prove that depth out scores flash!