The Eastern swim teams traveled to Indiana State this past Saturday to compete in a relay meet, which will be the teams’ last action until Jan. 9.

Sophomore Ivan Escott competed in multiple relays on Saturday. Escott reflected on the meet and the overall team energy entering it.

“Our last meet was pretty good. We had some pretty good swims, but it was just a relay, so it was all about having fun and having good team atmosphere on deck,” Escott said.

He went on to say that most of the relays went very well, and then Escott highlighted the performances of Forrest Baumgartner and Scott House. He went on to mention some other big performances at the meet.

“Our 400-free relay was really awesome at the end, we won that to finish out the meet, which is really cool to see,” Escott said. “The most fun event was probably 4 by 100 IM relay, that’s always fun because just last year the 100 IM got introduced to college swimming as an individual event, so four people doing that in a relay was really fun.”

Junior Karleen Gernady, who also competed at the Indiana State meet, briefly explained some differences between a relay meet and regular meet.

“You get to swim events you don’t normally swim, so a lot of us did swim off-events, which is different, which is nice,” Gernady said. “It was fun because you get to cheer on teammates that you don’t normally get to be on relays with.”

She also mentioned the difference in the way the team prepares for this type of meet.

“We practice a lot of relay starts. We practice safe starts because if you leave early you get disqualified,” Gernady said.

She went on to highlight that the men’s team came up big in a lot of their relay events against some good competition. Gernady also expressed a lot of pride in her own women’s team.

“I think it’s going really well, especially on the girl’s side. I think we have a really good group of girls, we all work well together, and I think the team atmosphere this year has been the best in all my three years,” Gernady said. “The girls and guys teams work really well together. I think this is like the first year the guys have been so supportive of us and they are always behind our lanes cheering for us and yelling for us, which is really awesome.”

Eric Hendrix can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]