Homestead Jugmen fall to Cedarburg
January 9, 2015
While it wasn’t a victory last night for the Homestead Jugmen, on an evening filled with senior speeches, parent thank-yous and victories in individual events, the team wasn’t terribly disheartened by their 110-75 loss to Cedarburg.
After all, it was a close meet. At the halfway point, the varsity score was nearly tied at 38-39. “Our team felt good after the meet,” Sahil Dutta, junior, said. “We had put forth our best effort and almost beat Cedarburg.”
There were many high points for Homestead during the competition, with the 200 medley relay team of Chris Eckhardt and James Guskov, sophomores, and Whelan Callahan and Zach Abramovich, seniors, beating the bulldogs to win the event. Eckhart also won the 100 Backstroke, and Callahan went on to place second in his 100 Breaststroke. “We all raced harder than we ever have before, and I’m glad I got the job done for my team,” Eckhardt said.
“It was a hard week for both of us,” Coach Mark Gwidt said of Cedarburg’s team and his own. “We’re both swimming hard and looked tired,” Coach Gwidt said. But Coach Gwidt isn’t disheartened by the loss; on the contrary, he says this meet has told him what his team needs to focus on in the weeks leading up to the North Shore Conference meet.
“We need to work on our relay starts, our breathing techniques and on having better second halves of our races. Our best bet is to focus on our sprinters,” Coach Gwidt said. But he also added that the outcome of this meet was exactly what he expected and that it reaffirmed what he was thinking in terms of what his athletes would be swimming.
“We knew we probably weren’t going to win, but we fought as hard as we could,” Callahan said. Looking forward, in the weeks leading up to conference the team will train harder than it has before. But despite the loss and weeks of training ahead, John Happ, senior, summarized the meet well when he said “the spirit of the jug was high.”
