Nine hundred swimmers and 300 artistic swimmers swam over to the Santa Clarita Aquatics Center for the 32nd annual LA84 Los Angeles County Swim meet.
The festival was broken into four categories across two days. For Saturday, Aug. 11, the swim meet category and the artistic swim competition took over the center’s two pools.
The swim meet featured 60 events for the 16 agencies competing broken into three divisions based on team size. Swimmers ranged in age from 7-17, grouping the ages no more than three years apart to keep each event fair for the swimmers.
The Santa Clarita Aquatics team was placed in the Red Division that held the medium-sized teams, along with Long Beach, Santa Monica, Glendale and South Gate.
The largest teams were placed in the Blue Division which was made up of L.A. County North Region, L.A. City Valley Region, L.A. County-East, L.A. City Pacific Region, L.A. County South and L.A. City Metro Region.
Finally, the smallest teams were placed in the White Division, which consisted of Pasadena, the Carson Tigersharks, Ventura, LA Mirada LA84 and Palmdale.
Each division would total the points each swimmer won during their events and total them to determine the winning team.
Winning for the blue team was the L.A. County North Region, which includes the Castaic Aquatics Center with 1,487 points over the L.A. City-Valley Region with 1,448 points in second place. The Santa Clarita Aquatics Team took home the gold with 1,014 points over second place Long Beach who finished with 523 points. Winning for the White Division was Palmade with a combined point total of 391 over second place Carson Tigersharks with 259 points.
“The LA84 Foundation was founded after the (1984) Summer Olympics, so every year they host a swim festival,” said Taylor Bellina, a program specialist with the Santa Clarita Aquatics Center. “Historically, this has been at the L.A. Coliseum three years ago. LA84 asked us to host. We started off just doing just dive and swim team. This year was the first time they asked us to host all four.”
Next week the Aquatics Center will host the second two events of water polo and the dive competition on Sunday, Aug 19.
