Reflecting on the team’s win at Sections, sophomore Maya Lee was pleased with her personal accomplishment as well as the team’s success.

“I think it went really well. I got some of my highest scores that I’ve gotten,” Lee said. “As a team we did really well and so did my routines.”

Park’s synchro team placed first at Sections held May 11 and May 18.

According to Lee, the pool at Sections provided an ideal space for competition.

“I really enjoyed spending time with everyone, that was fun,” Lee said. “The pool is bigger than our pool. It’s pretty deep which is good because our pool is a lot shallower, so we had more space and everything. And it had eight lanes too.”

Assistant coach Jessica Gust said each group swam their best competitive routine of the season at the Sections meet.

“We ended up winning the Section, which is great and everybody had awesome swims and people were excited,” Gust said. “We have never not won the Section. We had 22 teens and only two of them didn’t qualify to go to State, so one team full of brand-new swimmers this year and one duet in a really competitive division and they got fifth.”

According to Gust, two meets, one figure and one routine contributed to the team’s final Section placement.

“Two Saturdays ago we did figures and this past Saturday we did routine. Each of those scores makes up 50 percent of the overall routine scores,” Gust said. “They take the figure average for everyone who was in the routine and then they add that to the routine score and they’re worth equal portions and so those two scores added together is what the final ranking is.”

Lee said using a different pool for Sections also created some challenges.

“Last year, it was at our pool, so we had the advantage there of knowing the whole pool and being used to everything,” Lee said. “This year we didn’t have that really, but I still think it went really well.”

According to Gust, the team focuses on preparing figures for the first half of the synchro season and this year they had to learn two new figures as a part of the four-year rotation.

“Every four years we get new figures so we’re relatively used to that and so we just spend a little extra time on those in the beginning,” Gust said. “One of them is sort of notorious, kids don’t really like it. It’s called a kip and it’s a really challenging figure because you have to do it blind, you’re tucked up in a little ball so you can’t see but I think our girls did a really great job of adapting to that figure and really working the drills that we did.”

According the Lee, now that Sections has finished, the team is preparing for State, which is May 23-24.

“We are still having regular morning practices, and the individual routines are staying after a lot to work on stuff and make sure everything is matched and synchronized,” Lee said. “We are having our regular practices with lots of swim throughs for our routines.”