A relay of three freshmen and one junior crushed a 25-year-old Millard South school record this past week at the Metropolitan Conference Meet prelims for the girl’s 200 Medley Relay. 

The relay consisted of freshmen Kindsey Joyce, Addisyn Storms, Parker Schmieding, and junior Mia Augustine.

“I was in shock at first,”Augustine said. “I was so happy! I saw how proud our coaches were and it made me proud to be swimming with these girls,” she said. 

The relay team’s time was 1:50.37, which placed them fourth out of 16 schools. 

The original Millard South school record was set back in 1997 by Kelly Lorenz, Melissa Patterson, Stephanie Patterson, and Robyn Palmer with a time of 1:51.68. 

“What makes it even more special for me is I remember when it was set back in 1997, I was a sophomore here at South they were my teammates!” coach Tyler Hammond said.

“It’s crazy because I’ve seen so many people break records before and I wasn’t expecting us to become one of those people,” Schmieding said. 

With this being the freshmen’s first metro meet and the juniors third, they had mixed emotions, but also knew how to prepare themselves going into this meet. 

“When prepping for state, Coach Hammond kept us in the weight room to keep our strength up and kept us later than the metro team to work on technique, but also speed,” Storms said. 

Coach Hammond said he wanted to try out a new technique to help relieve some stress on the swimmers. 

“I decided to try a 3 day drop taper/rest with them, it was just enough rest for them to start feeling good in the water.  We put more focus on relay starts and speeding up our transitions from swimmer to swimmer,” Hammond said.

The team is competing at state swimming Feb. 25.

“I am expecting them to rewrite the entire record board over the next 4 years,” Hammond said.