By ADAM KUJAWSKI, Staff Writer
The annual BISD Fall Festival swim meet kicks off today at the Margaret M. Clark Aquatic Center and will feature several schools from across the Rio Grande Valley .
The meet will last two days, with the diving portion beginning at 11 a.m. today and the swimming events starting at 10 a.m. Saturday.
Monica Rosales, who has been the aquatic center administrator for seven years, hopes to have upward of 500 swimmers for the weekend competition.
The high school swimming season is near its midway point, and teams will be approaching the Fall Festival with different goals in mind.
Hanna Golden Eagles coach Samuel L. Perez is looking to get some members of his team on track ahead of next week’s Texas Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association competition in Corpus Christi .
“It’s really important to look for TISCA times to qualify,” Perez said. “Right now I’ve got a total of six kids that are qualified to go.”
A number of Hanna’s swimmers elected to forgo competing in the previous meet in order to keep themselves under the maximum amount of competitions a high school swimmer is allowed to enter during a given season.
Perez is looking forward to having his team back at full strength for the Fall Festival.
“We didn’t do so well (in our last meet),” he said. “Since the strong swimmers needed to eliminate one meet, most of them picked that one. So it was really my freshman meet.”
Some competitors to watch on Hanna’s team include swimmer Maya Imperial and diver Raul Garcia. Garcia will compete today, and Imperial will swim Saturday.
However, Perez wouldn’t hint at how he planned to use Imperial so as to not reveal his strategy to the other coaches.
“It’s really a chess game,” he said.
The Pace Vikings also will be competing this weekend. But the Vikings are a young team and use meets such as the Fall Festival to aid in development and to figure out team strengths.
“Overall, we’re kind of a rebuilding team,” Vikings coach Brian Wild said. “We should be a stronger team next year. I don’t have a lot of seniors.”
Swimmers Victor Reyes and Jose Hernandez, though, have impressed Wild this season.
As of press time, there are 16 confirmed teams registered to compete in the Fall Festival, but the registration deadline officially ended at midnight Thursday.
Adam Kujawski covers sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6663 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter he’s @adamkujo1.