Dalton Leading Bill Caulkins City Swim Meet After First Day

Long-time Dalton swim coach Charles Todd announced his resignation earlier in the week to take another job  down near Atlanta and his Dolphins want to make sure he goes out with a bang.

Those Dalton Dolphins, who dominated the Blue Division in the Chattanooga Area Swim League this summer, hold a 55-point lead over Signal Mountain following the first day of action in the annual Bill Caulkins City Meet, which is being held at Warner Park.

The Dolphins totaled 1.152.5 points while the Green Giants aren’t far behind with 1,097.5.  The Ooltewah Tidal Waves are third in the 15-team field with 877 while Stuart Heights and Fairyland round out the top five teams with 687 and 519 points, respectively.

Todd has been the director of the Carpet Capital Aquatic Club for the past 16 years, but he’ll be headed South on Monday when he takes over as the director for the Chattahoochee Gold Swim Club.  He just hopes he can go out on top after many years of success as the Dalton leader.

“I’m pretty sure we’re up right now, but I’d love to get thrown in just one more time,” he said after the final session on Friday evening had ended.

“We won most of the boys events today  and I’m really pleased about that, but I’m hoping that we’ll be even stronger tomorrow.  It’s always tight with Signal Mountain, but it looks like it’s going to be a two-pony show on Saturday.  We just have to carry over the success we had today,” he added.

Jason Meszaros, who has been Todd’s assistant for the past seven years, has been named as the interim coach for the Dolphins.  He too was happy with the way his team performed on a hot first day.

“All of these kids really love coach Todd and they want to send him out with a big win.  We wanted to get a big jump today, but we always do better on the second day as those are our stronger events.  But we did about all we could possibly do to get us headed in the right direction,” Meszaros added.

Signal Mountain coach Stephanie Cohen saw a lot of bright spots, but she also saw several incidents where her team could have done better.

“We’re doing okay, but we could have done better with some of our younger kids.  We had a couple of pretty good kids get disqualified earlier in the day and that always hurts, but tomorrow is a new day.  But overall, we had some pretty good swims today,” she nodded with a smile.

There were nine individuals who won two events on Friday, but none were any more impressive than Signal Mountain’s Susannah LaRochelle, who won the 50 Breast and the 100 Individual Medley and both in record-breaking times.

Her time of 29.74 seconds was the best in the 50 breast while she actually broke the 100 IM record twice, erasing the old mark of 1:01.20 in the preliminary round with a time of 59.56 seconds and then breaking it again by a full second in the finals.

Teammate Jewel Gordon broke the record in the 50 breast for 11-12 girls with a time of 32.04 seconds while the Green Giants also rewrote the 15-18 200 Medley Relay record with a 1:50.71.

The other two records broken by the girls came in the 9-10 age group where Ooltewah had a time of 2:20.12 in winning the 200 medley relay.  Fairyland’s Ellie Taliaferro broke the 100 IM mark with a time of 1:09.40.

There were only two records broken by the boys and both came in the 200 medley relay and both by Dalton.  The first came in the 13-14 race with a time of 1:48.38 while the second came from those 15-18 young men with a time of 1:37.90.

Other double winners in addition to Taliaferro and LaRochelle included MaeMae Powe of Big Ridge, Cleveland’s Grayson Payne, Stuart Heights’ Gwennie Davis, Fairyland’s Ben Bevill, Signal Mountain’s Sam McHugh and Dalton teammates Will Haley and Emilio Valdez.

THE MEET CONCLUDES with more finals on Saturday night, including butterfly, freestyle and backstroke among the individual events and the ever-exciting freestyle relays.