This Time, Skyline Ends Close Race in 1st
November 21, 2015
By Butch Harmon
Second Half editor
HOLLAND – After coming in a close second at last year’s Lower Peninsula Division 2 girls swimming and diving championships at the Holland Aquatic Center, the Ann Arbor Skyline girls returned to the same pool this year and came away with some different results.
Moving back into Division 1, Skyline won the first-place trophy as it held off Saline in a tight battle that was close throughout.
Skyline totaled 290 team points for the two-day event to win its first girls swimming and diving championship. Saline, last year’s Division 1 champion, placed second with 238 points while Farmington Hills Mercy, winners of two of the previous four LPD1 titles, placed third with 217 points.
“Last year it came down to the last event,” said Skyline coach Maureen Isaac. “We’ve been runner-ups a couple of times, and it’s very frustrating. We were here last year at this pool, and to come back this year and do it here means a lot.”
Skyline’s victory took a total-team effort and was won over the two days of the event. Work that the Eagles did on Friday paid off Saturday, as Skyline set up the scoring opportunities to get the win.
“We moved some kids around on different relay teams Friday,” Isaac said. “We took some chances, and it paid off. We had a great group of girls and they are wonderful as a team. It might sound cheesy, but it’s true; they just feed off each other. ”
It also helped that Skyline had senior Katie Portz to rely on. A senior who has committed to swim collegiately at Texas A&M, Portz was named the swimmer of the meet by the coaches association for her performance. Portz won a pair of individual titles and was also part of two Skyline relay teams that captured championships.
“This is just an incredible feeling,” Portz said. “It feels so good and I’m so happy for all of my teammates. We took it to a new level as a team this year.”
Portz played a big role in helping the team do so. She took first place in the 100-yard freestyle in a new LP Division 1 meet record time of 49.34, breaking her previous record of 50.23 set two years ago.
Portz also captured the 200 freestyle in a time of 1:46.84.
“It felt great winning swimmer of the meet, but the team title means so much more,” Portz said. “Winning the team state is a great feeling. All the hard work that we put into this has paid off.”
Portz’s coach was especially happy that Skyline was able to capture the elusive MHSAA title this season for her standout senior.
“I really wanted us to do this for Katie Portz,” Isaac said. “She has been such an important part of this program both in the pool and out of the pool. It was important for us to do this before her career was done.”
In the 200 freestyle relay, Portz teamed up with sophomore Maddie McAdams, sophomore Emily Lock and senior Kaelan Oldani to take first place in a time of 1:35.67.
Skyline cemented the win as it also captured the final event of the meet, the 400 freestyle relay. Portz anchored the team that included junior Emma Cleason, Lock and sophomore Georgia Mosher that turned in a winning time of 3:24.56.
Skyline also had two other individual champions crowned. Cleason took first place in the 200 individual medley in a time of 2:01.51, while Mosher claimed the 500-yard freestyle in a time of 4:54.65.
Saline junior diver Cam McPherson captured an individual title. She took second place last year and was sixth as a freshman.
“Last year I feel I didn’t focus as much,’ McPherson said. “This year I felt like I had a lot better focus. I thought I had some real good dives. I was also more focused to help my team as we needed all the points we could get.”
Sophomore Katie Minnich led the way for third-place Mercy as she repeated in the 100 backstroke in a time of 54.67.
“Winning it a second time is real special,” Minnich said. “I was confident that I could do it. There was pressure on me to win it again, but I like the pressure. There is always pressure and if there is not any pressure, it’s not worth doing.”
Minnich was also a member of Mercy’s 200 medley relay team that also won. She swam the first leg and was followed by junior Allison Lobbia, junior Alaina Skellett and freshman Annette Dombkowski as they turned in a winning time of 1:44.44.
Grand Blanc junior Emma Curtis was another repeat champion. Curtis repeated in the 50-yard freestyle in a time of 23.07, a new personal record.
“It was a lot more exciting this year,” Curtis said. “I wanted to go 22 (seconds) and I just missed it by a few hundredths of a second. I felt a lot better this year and felt a lot less stress. I want to come back next year and win it as a senior.”
After finishing second at Finals the past three years, Zeeland senior Morgan Bullock broke through to the top step of the victory stand. She won the 100-yard butterfly in 54.42 seconds in front of her hometown fans.
“I’ve been runner-up in everything at state since my freshman year,” said Bullock, who will swim at the University of West Virginia. “This is my senior year and I’ve worked real hard for this. I just wanted to go out and do the best I could. I liked that I had a chance to win it close to home. A lot more of my teammates and friends and family members were able to see me win it.”
Rockford, the fourth-place team, was paced by junior Sydney McDowell, who won the 100-yard breaststroke in a time of 1:03.84.
PHOTOS: (Top) Ann Arbor Skyline’s Emily Lock was among contributors to her team’s MHSAA championship. (Middle) Zeeland’s Morgan Bullock capped her high school career with her first title. (Click for more from HighSchoolSportsScene.com.)
No Slowing Down For Oxford's Krajcarski After Championship Finish
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
December 12, 2024
OXFORD — A championship was won, school history was made, and the accolades have been constant and deserved for Oxford senior Tristan Krajcarski.
But despite all of that, rest and taking it easy certainly hasn’t been on the itinerary for Krajcarski ever since she won the diving competition at the MHSAA Lower Peninsula Division 1 Finals on Nov. 23 – even though her high school athletic diving career is technically over.
“The most time I took off was two days,” Krajcarski said. “But I’ve been in the pool pretty much every day with the boys team working on 1 and 3-meter (dives).”
Next up for Krajcarski is a collegiate career at Buffalo, and in her words, there is “so much more” to achieve in the sport even after a terrific high school career.
Krajcarski qualified for the Finals three out of her four years at Oxford, finishing third as a junior with an All-American score of 329.05 before having a dominant senior season.
Krajcarski won every event she competed in this fall, highlighted by becoming the first diver — boys or girls — from Oxford to win a Finals title when she accumulated 432.60 points, nearly 40 points more than runner-up Lindi Jenkins of Saline.
What drove Krajcarski to the top of the state and what still drives her to do more was her greatest disappointment, which occurred during her sophomore year.
After qualifying for the Finals as a freshman, Krajcarski had a disappointing 2022 Regional and didn’t advance. She rallied behind teammates and supported them during their championship events in Holland, but not competing herself there became a rallying cry.
“It was very hard to not have that expectation of (making the Finals) met when the people around me did,” she said. “I felt kind of defeated, and it motivated me to do more.
“It was kind of scary to do more, but I knew I wasn’t going to let it happen again. Just how I worked and how I viewed diving changed. Now I always have this motivation to always keep going, and it’s become my expectation. I don’t really like taking time off — even though I probably should — but I just feel like I can constantly get better to not be let down again.”
Krajcarski certainly wasn’t disappointed with her junior and senior years, which featured the third-place finish as a junior, the Finals championship this year and a trip to Rome, Italy, this past summer as a representative of the AAU U.S. national team, which competed in the same venue used for the 1960 Summer Olympics.
John Pearson, the diving coach for both Oxford and Lake Orion, said Krajcarski easily could have scored even higher at the Finals, but that more difficult dives simply weren’t necessary.
“She was already outscoring everybody by 40 points with a tuck position instead of a pike position,” he said. “At the state meet, we decided to stay with what she was comfortable with. To me, it was more important at that meet to be comfortable. All Tristan had to do at the state meet was be herself and get up and down 11 times. I was confident that if she did that and if she did her best, nobody could catch her.”
Not too shabby for someone who didn’t even get into diving until the spring of her eighth grade year.
Krajcarski originally was a gymnast but said after a while she got burned out in that sport before discovering a love for diving.
“I’ve always loved the water and I always liked swimming, but I wasn’t very good at swimming itself,” she said. “Combining what I’d already known of gymnastics with the water, it made me very happy. People think it’s really similar to gymnastics, but you have to learn a whole new set of techniques. I thought it was cool to go through the process of learning something new while still having the experience from gymnastics.”
It was obviously a successful switch, and now nothing is slowing her passion to get better at diving every day.
As the last couple of weeks have shown, not even a championship has made Krajcarski complacent.
“I can get way better,” she said.
Keith Dunlap has served in Detroit-area sports media for more than two decades, including as a sportswriter at the Oakland Press from 2001-16 primarily covering high school sports but also college and professional teams. His bylines also have appeared in USA Today, the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Houston Chronicle and the Boston Globe. He served as the administrator for the Oakland Activities Association’s website from 2017-2020. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Oxford senior Tristan Krajcarski, holding the “champion” sign, stands atop the podium after receiving her medal for winning the Division 1 diving competition last month. (Middle) Krajcarski reaches the water on a dive during the Finals. (Click for more from High School Sports Scene.)