West Ranch sweeps team titles; girls beat Valencia by one point
Two Foothill League records were broken at the league swim finals held last week at the Santa Clarita Aquatics Center.
Hart senior Aly Yokoyama broke the record in the girls’ 100-yard backstroke with a time of 53.41 seconds. The Cornell University commit took first place in the event for the second consecutive year and now heads into the CIF Southern Section Division 1 preliminaries as the second seed.
Valencia junior Tori Yamamura was first in the girls’ 100-yard butterfly for the second straight year with a league-record time of 52.92 seconds. She’s now set to compete at the section D1 preliminaries as the top seed.
While those two individuals rose to excellence, both West Ranch teams were crowned champions. The West Ranch boys finished with 527.5 points, over 100 points more than Valencia in second place. The West Ranch girls finished just a point ahead of Valencia with 462 points.
Valencia’s girls were the only team to beat West Ranch in the regular season.
West Ranch head coach Kearsten Livingstone said earning a sweep — both of the junior varsity West Ranch teams also won — hasn’t happened in her seven years of coaching.
“The reason a sweep is so hard is because there can’t be any hole in the team,” Livingstone wrote in an email. “Meaning, you can’t have strong boys and a weaker girls’ team and sweep. The other reason is it’s so difficult is, it takes every swimmer and diver on the team to make finals in order to make this possible. This means it’s not up to your fastest 12 varsity kids on the team. It’s every swimmer at every level working hard all season, improving and then showing up at league finals and racing for those points. One thing that has been so essential to our success is the ability to get every member of our team to contribute, score and improve throughout the overall season.”
All six of the West Ranch relay teams are set to compete at Thursday’s D1 preliminaries, set to be held at Mt. San Antonio College. The finals are set for Saturday at Mt. SAC.
West Ranch saw freshman Emma Hussein win both the girls’ 200-yard individual medley and the 100-yard breaststroke, while senior Dustin Saguros was first in both of those events in the boys’ division.
Other standout performances from West Ranch include: freshman Jace Lloyd winning both the boys’ 500 freestyle and the 100 backstroke; junior Gabe Eke winning the boys’ 50 freestyle and the 100 freestyle; and junior Brendan Keating taking first in the boys’ 200 freestyle.
Valencia had senior Jordan Lozada win the 100 butterfly with a time of 50.59 seconds, 0.01 seconds ahead of Saugus junior Logan Divine, last year’s league champion.
“He really set the tone for our younger swimmers, both at the meet and all year long,” Valencia head coach Matt Sheridan wrote in an email.
Also winning events for Valencia were junior Aubrey Martin in the girls’ 200 freestyle and senior Victoria Lawrence in the girls’ 500 freestyle.
“West Ranch has a strong team this year, and while our girls beat them in our dual meet, they earned the win this time around,” Sheridan wrote. “At the end of the day, we had many kids swim their personal or season best times, and we had multiple kids that earned CIF consideration times, including some underclassmen. You can’t ask for much more than that.”
