The Metro East Conference Relays are at the start of every swimming season, both boys and girls, and they are always held at The Grove Community Center in Inver Grove Heights. The purpose of the relays is to establish a baseline of times and where the team is at the onset of the season, it also serves as a refresher of how meets are run helping new and old swimmers establish a meet routine. These seed times give the swimmers a target to improve on for the next meet.

Scoring a dual meet is easy once you get the hang of it, and that scoring will be explained in the first article covering a dual meet each season. Scoring a relay only meet like the Conference Relays is, well, much more complicated than what is understood here, so here are the basics. A first-place finish is worth 40 points, then second down to eighth goes 34, 32, 30, 28, 26, 24, 22.

The Raiders finished the overall meet in second place, just eight points behind Mahtomedi.

1. Mahtomedi High School Zephyrs 308

2. Hastings Raiders 300

3. Two Rivers 239

4. Simley High School 236

5. Hill-Murray School 226

6. Tartan Senior High School 209

7. Loons 204

8. North 100

Hastings placed first in several of the relays including the 400-medley relay, the 850-freestyle relay which is referred to as a crescendo style relay where the first swimmer Greta Larson swam 50 yards, then Izzy Green swam 100 yards, Sofia Kovalenko swam 200 yards and Kira Aarness finished the race with 500 yards. They also finished first in the 400-freestyle relay, and they took first place in the diving portion.

What kept them close to Mahtomedi was the fact that they did only place worse than third once and that was a fourth place finish in the 200 backstroke. Otherwise, they placed second or third the rest of the way.

Each week, the Raider coaches pick their swimmer and diver of the meet. The swimmer of the meet was Liliana Burks. Burks had personal best times in all of her events, breaking the 30 second mark in the 50 freestyle for the first time ever and she beat her personal best by over a second in both the 50 butterfly and 50 backstroke.

The diver of the meet was Kira Fuechtmann. Fuechtmann is brand new to diving and according to McAlpin, “She did a fantastic job for her first time ever diving in a meet including performing a difficult dive.”

The Raiders will travel to John Glen to take on the Hill-Murray Pioneers on August 29 at 6:00 p.m.