Shortcoming to be positive

INDIANAPOLIS — After feeling disappointed Friday night, Cady Farlow finished with a smile on her face Saturday.
Anne Vormohr, meanwhile, gritted her way through a painful finish.
Neither swimmer had the weekend she was hoping for, but both left the IU Natatorium with plenty of motivation to reverse those fortunes next year.
Farlow, a South Adams High School junior, won the consolation heat of the 100-yard breaststroke Saturday at the IHSAA Girls Swimming and Diving State Finals to give her a ninth-place finish in the event.
Jay County’s Vormohr was also battling for the top spot in her consolation race, finishing third in her heat and 11th overall in the 100 backstroke.
“I want to medal,” said Farlow, already looking toward her senior season. “I guess I’m just going to have to make some changes, work a little bit harder and hopefully I can do it next year.”
Vormohr also talked about additional training in order to get back to the medal podium where she stood last season.
“I still have two more years,” she said. “It just tells me how much I need to go out and I need to do that cross-training … It just has to be a combined effort everywhere. All around, I need to work. …
“I’ll be pushed.”
Farlow entered the state finals as the No. 4 seed in the 100 breaststroke after shattering her own sectional, pool and school records at the Jay County sectional. But Friday night’s preliminaries left her one spot short of the state championship race in ninth place even though she was just 0.02 seconds off her sectional time.
She returned Saturday with a simple goal — win the consolation race.
The junior was up to that challenge, taking control in the second 25 yards and then pulling away in the final 50. She won the heat by more than a second in 1 minute, 4.13 seconds, the third-fastest time of her career, and was quicker than two of the swimmers in the championship heat.
“Even though I slowed down a little bit today, I was actually a lot more happy with today,” said Farlow, who had a time of 1:04.01 in Friday’s preliminaries. “I’m not upset just because I know I did as well as I could do. I really gave that race my all.”
“(Friday) I just wasn’t confident when I hit the wall. And today, I had a smile on my face. I just feel a lot more motivated for next year.”
Bethany Galat of Penn won the breaststroke in 59.66 as both she and runner-up Lillia King (59.99) of Evansville Reitz became the first swimmers in state history to break the 1-minute mark in the event.
Records fell in 10 of 12 events Friday and Saturday, and Carmel won its 28th straight championship with 399 points compared to 209 for runner-up Crown Point.
Vormohr got off to a great start in the 100 backstroke, leaving coach Matt Slavik confident she would reach her goal of breaking the 56-second mark. But by the time she reached the mid-point of the race, she was struggling to keep churning through the water.
“From the start of the race … I said, ‘She’s got it,’” said Slavik. “The problem is what I’m seeing and what she was feeling were two different things.”
The swim never felt quite right to Vormohr, and the pain set in for the second half of the race.
She fought through it to place third in the heat just 0.02 seconds behind Castle’s Christie Jensen and 11th in the state in 56.98 seconds.
“It didn’t feel great, right off the bat,” said Vormohr, who placed fifth in the state in the event last season. “I could tell on my kick off, it was so long of a kick off that I knew it wasn’t perfect. And then after that first 50, I hit a brick wall. It was like I was trying to push a wall. … It felt like I was carrying so much more than my body.
“I just hit a brick wall, and I couldn’t move. It was like my body shut off.”
Carmel’s Claire Adams won the event in a state-record time of 52.97.
After having five swimmers — a junior, two sophomores and two freshmen — compete in eight events during Friday evening’s preliminaries, Slavik expressed confidence his team will do everything it can to return and improve next season.
“One of the things I love about this group of girls is they’re very forward thinking and they’re very coach-able and they work as a team,” he said. “Just in talking to everybody today … I know that they’ll use this as a positive …”[[In-content Ad]]