Amidst the echoing screams and cheers at Richards Pool on Saturday, Scarborough swimming coach Bill Stone thought to himself, “we might not win.”
It wasn’t the boys portion of the meet against Falmouth that he was concerned about. The Red Storm had things pretty well under control from the get-go. But the girls meet was a different story. Stone and his team expected a tooth-and-nail battle with the defending Class B state champs, and that was exactly what they got.
Freshmen divers Gayle Bufo and Alexis Garrison proved to be the difference-makers. The pair combined for 10 points – Falmouth didn’t have any divers competing in the meet – to lift the Red Storm to a 93-87 win. The boys won 120-57.
“It’s huge. It’s a huge motivator for us,” said Stone. “The next big meet that we have is Cape Elizabeth, which is going to be huge at the end of the month. It’s going to be a really big one for both the girls and the boys.
“The Falmouth meet, when we got the date of that meet we knew it was going to be a big one because we haven’t been able to beat them recently.”
The Scarborough girls were led by sophomore Nicole Harmon, who finished second in the 200-yard individual medley (2:16.94) and broke her own school record in the 100-yard backstroke. Her time of 59.54 seconds was less than a half-second off of the state record.
“When you’re swimming, you can feel if you’re swimming well, but it’s so hard to tell how you’re doing time-wise without looking at the clock,” said Harmon. “And I feel like sometimes if you overthink how well you’re doing time-wise then you tend to screw yourself up, almost. It’s better to just swim it and see how you did.”
Harmon adopted the same thought process in the overall team meet.
“We knew that having our divers was certainly going to help our team, but we didn’t realize how close it was until the end,” she said. “Obviously we knew it was going to be a very close meet, but going into every event we were just going, ‘OK guys, we just need to do our best and see how many more points we can score for our team.'”
Sophomore Nicole Glab and senior Carrie Chykaliuk were big scorers for the Red Storm as well. Glab was first in the 200 freestyle (2:01.40) and first in the 500 free (5:24.89), while Chykaliuk was first in the 50 free (25.76) and first in the 100 free (56.35).
Sophomore Danielle Gravel, meanwhile, was third in the 100-yard butterfly (1:03.10) and second in the 100-yard breaststroke (1:16.77).
On the boys side of things, the Red Storm made an early statement with a win in the first event of the day, the 200-yard medley relay. The team, made up of seniors Doug Endrizzi and Casey Brucken and juniors Jonathan Russell and Kaycee Stevens, won by nearly 10 seconds.
Scarborough followed that up with victories in six of the remaining 10 events.
Endrizzi, a team captain, was the big winner. In addition to being on the victorious medley relay team, he won the 50-yard freestyle (22.51) and the 100 free (49.00) and anchored the winning 200 free relay team. He was happiest with his performance as the 200 relay anchor.
“That was the first time I had swum it and the first time we had swum it in a long time,” he said. “We generally don’t put our best swimmers there, and it was a fun race because everyone was trying hard. We all got psyched up and swam well. That was what I was really excited about because it was lower than I’ve ever gone before.”
Endrizzi liked what he saw in the girls meet as well.
“I was really impressed by how well the team came together, especially at the end when it was so close and all our relays – especially the girls relays – just did a great job,” he said. “It was incredible.”
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