Dexter Builds Lead, Carries it to D2 Title
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
March 12, 2016
UNIVERSITY CENTER – Mike McHugh was floating on his back in the Saginaw Valley State University pool Saturday afternoon, water soaking his clothes and a smile covering his face.
The Dexter coach, who had spent the previous four hours wearing out his shoes walking the pool’s deck, could now relax as his Dreadnaughts had won the Lower Peninsula Division 2 boys swimming and diving championship.
“It was the best swim I’ve ever had,” said McHugh, who also led Dexter to an MHSAA title in 2012 and a runner-up finish in 2014. “These guys work. I’m thankful for all the work they put in. I’m thankful for all the support I get from home. It’s a relief. It’s been a lot of pressure being ranked No. 1 all year, so being able to finish it off feels really good.”
Behind championship swims in the 200-yard freestyle and 100 backstroke by senior Rob Zofchak, and 13 total top-eight finishes, Dexter finished with a meet-best 284 points. Warren DeLaSalle was second with 266, two-time reigning champion Birmingham Seaholm was third with 211 and Battle Creek Lakeview was fourth with 205.
“We knew coming in we had to build up a lead,” McHugh said. “DeLaSalle’s really good in the back and breast(stroke). We’re really good in the 200 (freestyle), 500 and (individual medley). We knew we had to go big, and having seven top-eight swims in those three events was huge. I had three seniors make top eight in the 200 free (Zofchak, Matt Bergdolt who was second, and David Merz who was eighth). That’s the leadership we’ve got. Three senior leaders, two of them captains, just doing everything they can.”
Dexter still had work to do in the final race of the meet, although it wasn’t much. If DeLaSalle didn’t win the 400 freestyle relay, all the Dreadnaughts needed to win the meet were to not get disqualified in the race. They finished second, one spot ahead of the Pilots. Fittingly, it was Zofchak who swam the final leg of the relay.
“It’s something special,” Zofchak said. “You feel great. Even though you’re swimming hard, you’re going as hard as you can and you’re really tired, you still feel great. Like, ‘Wow. There’s not much I can do right now to mess this up.’”
The anchor leg capped off a great day in the pool for Zofchak, who won the 200 freestyle in 1 minute, 38.23 seconds, and the 100 backstroke in 49.26 – breaking his own meet record.
“I swam pretty well,” he said. “There’s definitely things I can improve on, and I’ll keep working on those, but in general I’m pretty proud of my swims.”
Zofchak was one of three swimmers to take home two individual titles on the day, joining Grosse Pointe South’s Jacob Montague and Midland Dow’s Nehemiah Mork.
Montague won the 200 individual medley and 100 breaststroke with LP Division 2 meet records of 1:47.4 and 53.93, respectively. It was the second straight year he’d won MHSAA titles in those events.
As Montague swam to commanding leads in both races, spectators watched in awe, some even counting the number of times he came out of the water in the breaststroke and marveling at how infrequently he did so.
“My freshman year, I only qualified for one event at the state meet and I didn’t even make it to finals,” Montague said. “I never thought that I’d be able to compete at a level like this. These past couple years I’ve given everything I can in the pool, every practice, every day. I just give 100 percent, just trying to get better. When everything pays off in the end, it’s just a great feeling.”
Mork was also a repeat champion in both of his events. He won the 50 freestyle in 20.83 seconds, one hundredth of a second ahead of Seaholm’s Liam Little. Mork won the 100 in 45.43 seconds.
“I could kind of see that (Little) was close to me – I had no idea it was a hundredth of a second close,” Mork said. “I saw him gliding a little bit; that’s when I knew I had to get a good finish, and I touched him out. But then everybody started cheering and I thought, ‘Aw shoot, I lost.’
“Then I looked up and it was a hundredth of a second and I still won, so I’ll take it.”
Also repeating as champion was Seaholm diver Sebastian Fay, who won with 479.4 points. He had a commanding lead coming into the final dives, but didn’t rest on his laurels.
“It puts more (pressure) on me, because diving is a sport where anything can happen,” Fay said. “I try not to let the lead get in my head because then I’ll just relax. With that dive especially, that last dive, I need to go after it, and if I relax I’m going to screw it up.
“So honestly, I felt a little more nervous at the end. My heart was pounding pretty hard, so I had to calm down.”
Seaholm won the 200 and 400 freestyle relays, while DeLaSalle won the 200 medley relay. DeLaSalle’s P.J. Desmet won the 100 butterfly in 51.21, while Rochester Adams’ Graham Miotke won the 500 freestyle in 4:35.64.
PHOTOS: (Top) Swimmers launch during Saturday’s LP Division 2 Finals at Saginaw Valley State University. (Middle) A diver arches during competition. (Below) Dexter poses with its championship trophy. (Click to see more at HighSchoolSportsScene.com.)
Dexter Extends Finals Win Streak to 4
By
Jason Schmitt
Special for MHSAA.com
March 9, 2019
YPSILANTI – It was only fitting that Casey Dolen was the last swimmer in the pool for Dexter on Saturday at the MHSAA Lower Peninsula Division 2 Boys Swimming & Diving Finals at Eastern Michigan University.
He was a member of the Dreadnaughts’ 2016 championship team. And he was there in 2017 and 2018 as well.
Dolen was the first to touch the wall in the 400-yard freestyle relay, helping his team win the event and lock down the program’s fourth straight Division 2 championship. He, along with senior Niklas Eberly and sophomores Michael Baumann and Clayton Kinnard, finished in a time of 3:06.84, comfortably beating out runner-up Birmingham Groves – which finished second overall in the team standings.
“This is a great group of kids, and to send these seniors out with four in a row is really special,” said Dexter head coach Michael McHugh, whose program has won five Finals titles since the 2012 season. “That’s our goal all year, but we never take anything for granted.
“The guys really stepped up. We knew Groves was going to come out strong. Our job was to not panic, not overreact and keep doing what we were doing. We knew we had a little bit of a lead (entering Saturday), so as long as we were mistake-free, we’d be OK.”
Groves did indeed come out strong. The Falcons quartet of senior David Helton, juniors Nolan Kamoo and Jackson Gugni and senior Hunter Reilly upended Dexter’s top-seeded 200 medley relay team to start the meet. Their time of 1:34.70 was the best of the weekend and gave their team an early six-point lead over the Dreadnaughts.
But it didn’t take long for Dexter to make its move. A runner-up finish by Dolen in the 200 freestyle helped cut Groves’ lead to three points – and it seemed to get the ball rolling for the Dreadnaughts.
Kinnard’s eighth-place finish in the next race, the 200 individual medley, gave his team an eight-point lead, one which it would not relinquish the rest of the day.
Dexter finished with 239 team points, besting Groves (203) and third-place Birmingham Seaholm (181.5). Midland Dow (162.5) and Grosse Pointe South (149) rounded out the top five.
Eberly was the star of the meet for Dexter. He won both the 50 freestyle and 100 butterfly events. His 20.40 seconds in the 50 matched his preliminary time and beat runner-up Luke Lezotte of Midland Dow by a tenth of a second.
His time of 47.79 in the 100 butterfly helped him repeat in the event. Walled Lake Northern’s Zane Rosely was a distant second, with a time of 49.94.
“It was definitely a goal of mine, since I started high school, to break 47,” Eberly said. “You don’t see a lot of high schoolers do it. It really sets you up well going into college like that. I knew I could do 47.5 if I really tried. I fell a little bit short, but I’m unbelievably happy with 47.7. I think it’s a phenomenal time.”
Eberly was one of the top swimmers entering the finals and knew he needed to swim up to those high expectations if his team was to have a chance to four-peat.
“I was super happy to be able to hold my places and help the team,” he said. “My situation is definitely different than other kids’. A lot of them have to step up, climb up, maybe they’re seeded eighth or 16th and they have no place to go but up. Going into states, I have nowhere to go but down. So it really adds a lot of pressure.”
Joining Eberly as a two-event winner was Fraser junior Alex Capizzo, who was victorious in both the 200 IM and 500 freestyle, a pair of events he also won a year ago. He beat out Rosely in the IM and Walled Lake Western junior Eric Hieber in the 500.
Hieber easily won the 200 freestyle, beating out Dolen by more than 1½ seconds.
Dolen did pick up an individual title, narrowly edging Lezotte by two hundredths of a second in the 100 freestyle.
Other individual winners included Jack Hamilton of Berkley, whose time of 50.51 in the backstroke helped him beat out runner-up Ben Conroy of Gibraltar Carlson by nearly a second. And Byron Center senior Jacob Glover bested the field in the 100 breaststroke, finishing in a winning time of 56.38
Midland Dow’s Che Collin, Zach Fewkes, Hans Dehn and Lezotte swam a time of 1:25.13 to take first place in the 200 freestyle relay.
In the diving competition, Okemos junior Hunter Hollenbeck repeated as champion, scoring 462.95 points. Rochester Adams sophomore SooDong Kim and Wyandotte Roosevelt freshman Hudson Hill finished second and third, respectively, both eclipsing 400 points.
Groves, which finished third behind Dexter and Rochester Adams a year ago, is losing a few key seniors to graduation, but returns a good nucleus of athletes, which has head coach Ricky Forrest excited for what lies ahead for his team.
“(Dexter is) an experienced team, and I’ve got a lot of respect for what Mike does with his guys. Every single year, no matter where they’re at on the psych sheet, every team here knows that they’re going to bring it,” Forrest said. “We had an outstanding day during the prelims on Friday and a really good day (on Saturday). We’re going to be missing a lot of (senior) leadership and we’re going to need some boys to step up next year, but we’ve still got a really good core and I’m looking forward to the challenge.”
Rochester Adams finished sixth overall with 138 points, with Gibraltar Carlson (120), Detroit U-D Jesuit (102.5), Walled Lake Western (91) and Temperance-Bedford (86.5) rounding out the top 10.
PHOTOS: (Top) Dexter senior Niklas Eberly swims the winning butterfly during Saturday’s Division 2 Finals at Eastern Michigan University. (Middle) Finishers in the 100 freestyle, including Dexter champion Casey Dolen, look to the scoreboard after their race. (Click for more from HighSchoolSportsScene.com.)