Swimming conundrums...

By Robert Przybylo
BPrzybylo@opubco.com

Even when you’re confident about your selections, picking All-City teams is never an easy thing to do.

And this year’s version of swimming became that much tougher when the classes were split up.

Here is the list for the boys and for the girls.

Someone who placed second in 5A might have well come in seventh or eighth in 6A. So in the end, I tried to gauge it by time more than say ranking. Swimming is swimming. There’s no real, tangible advantage to swimming for an Edmond or Jenks team compared to say Altus or Bixby or Heritage Hall.

If you know how to swim, you know how to do it. Maybe the bigger schools have better resources, but if a swimmer really wants to, there are ways to not get left behind.

That solved that issue for me.

The second was the “sad” saga of Norman North sophomore Wilson Wei and Edmond North senior Nikki Colton.

Individually, they may be two of the best 10 boys/girls swimmers in the state. But at state itself, they were in events where they came up just short and couldn’t make the first team.

Wei competed in the 200 IM and the 500 free. Well, you can’t take anything away from Edmond Memorial’s Daniel Enge, who placed higher than Wei in the IM and Deer Creek’s Typ Whinnery had the fastest 500 free time of anybody in any class in the prelims.

And then there’s Colton. This was a tough one. Either Colton or EM’s Jill Enge wasn’t going to make the first team. That’s just the way the draw worked out.