Orange Coast Women Capture SCC Title
By Robert Lewis
Mt. San Antonio College captures the men's team title and Orange Coast wins the women's title at the 14th Pasadena Invitational Swim Meet held April 4-5 at PCC's Aquatic Center.
The Mounties scored 934.5 points to outdistance second place Diablo Valley (790) and third place Orange Coast (532). In the women, OCC scored 804.5 points to defeat Diablo Valley (564.5) and American River (508). Mt. SAC was fourth at 456.5 and host Pasadena took fifth at 297.
The Invitational featured two meet records turned in by American River swimmer Jenner Johnson, who won the 50-yard breaststroke at 30.06 seconds. It snapped a 12-year-old Pasadena pool record (30.13 by Angie Matheu in 2002). Johnson then broke the 100-yard breaststroke record with a 1:06.39.
Jia Ng of Santa Monica snapped the men's 100-breaststroke meet and pool record with a 56.86 winning time (beat Akbar Nasution's 2008 time of 57.01).
PCC's Mohammad Esmaeilian was an upset winner in the men's 200-freestyle with a personal best 1:45.13. The Lancer had the slowest seed time of the 8 swimmers in the final heat, but pulled out the victory in the 8th lane.
Orange Coast's women 400-freestyle relay squad of Claire Aguilar, Kellie Thorsness, Kaitlyn Finney, and Kessy Hickey set a new meet record in their win at 3:39.78. The four set the 200-freestyle meet record to open the meet on Friday.
The high points scorer for women was Yingfei Zhang of East Los Angeles with
99 points and Mt. SAC's Bennett Yuan was high points for the men (89).