Goal same for Sacred Heart
Last season, Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy Coach Steve Bergen cited youth and depth as the Tologs’ defining characteristics. The two will go hand in hand once again this year, as Sacred Heart has added even more depth in the form of youth, naturally.
After losing just a couple of senior role players from the squad that claimed three Mission League individual titles and took third as a team.
“We’ve got everybody back, it’s great,” Bergen said. “We bring everybody back and we have a very special freshman this year.”
Actually, the Tologs will welcome three first-year swimmers who are poised to make an immediate impact, but the crown jewel of Bergen’s freshman class is Kirsten Vose.
“She should be top-eight at CIF [finals] in Division I in the breaststroke and she’ll be top-20 in the IM as well,” said Bergen, whose team did not qualify any swimmers for last year’s CIF Southern Section Division I finals. “She’s going to score points as a freshman. She’s a special swimmer.”
Vose and fellow newcomers Sarah Hughes and Katie Altman join the returning core of league titlists sophomore Katie Altmayer and junior Emily Balog, as well as junior Meg Ryan.
“Our relays now are going to be really good, I definitely think we’re the team to beat in league,” said Bergen, who hails Vose as the missing piece of his relays alongside Altmayer, Balog and Ryan. “We’re going to do really well and at least two of our three relays should score points this year [at CIF]. We’re going to be really good and we’re going to be really good for years to come with this batch that we have right now.”
Crescenta Valley, coming off its fourth straight Pacific League title, is in a bit of a different boat, as it lost many of its top swimmers from last season to graduation and will field a largely unproven group that includes nine sophomores and a freshman.
“That story sounds eerily similar to our water polo team in that we did lose a number of seniors and we are young,” said Falcons co-Coach Pete Loporchio, who will split coaching duties with Peter Kim. “It’s definitely a younger team.”
The story turned out pretty well for the Crescenta Valley water polo team ,which just wrapped up a 31-1 campaign that ended in the divisional semifinals, but the forecast may be harder to make out for the swimming team, which had just one qualifier for CIF finals last year.
The Falcons’ top swimmers are sophomores Iva Icheva, who was third in the Division II CIF finals in the 100-yard backstroke and Sabrina Hatzer, a standout water polo player who qualified for the Division II prelims last year.
“She’s one of the best athletes I think we’ve had in our program,” Loporchio said of Hatzer. “When you combine being an athlete with being a competitor, I think she will do very well.”
Loporchio will look to returners Heather Abrams, Gabrielle Granados and a slew of junior varsity up-and-comers to provide depth.
“We’re going to rely on a core group of girls’ water polo players and a handful of club swimmers and rely on our depth a little bit more than the frontliners,” Loporchio said.
Depth is something third-year Glendale Coach Forest Holbrook hopes to develop over the course of the season while relying on seniors Melissa Gonzalez, Jacqueline Jones and Venus Payandeh and juniors Byouregh Boghozian and Maddie Corpuz to win points in Pacific League meets and pursue CIF-qualifying marks.
“If we can get a relay [to CIF] for our girls, that would be outstanding,” Holbrook said. “That’s one of our goals, but right now the story of our team is we’ve just got a very young team with a few solid senior swimmers and the story of the year is how those younger swimmers progress between now and the end of the season.”
Kevin Witt is in his first year of coaching at Hoover, where juniors Lianna Khachikyan and Maria Alcantar will be the cornerstones of a young team.
“We’ve had a couple students come close [to CIF] in the past couple of years, so [we’re working on] really getting them to drop a little bit of time,” Witt said. “Obviously, we’re looking to qualify a couple of relays, if possible. Our relays should be fairly strong.”
Sophomore Jennifer Langen and senior Suzanna Tan both earned CIF consideration times last year and both are back to anchor Flintridge Prep’s Prep League-member squad under second-year Coach Ryan Goto.
“We have a lot of new people, a lot of people left last year, so we’re definitely getting a fresh batch,” Goto said. “We’ll see. I think we have a fair shot at [qualifying swimmers] for CIF.