This was definitely a time to celebrate! Carmel won the 2007 Long Course State Championships. Matt's 13-14 year old boys' group won high points, so they were really excited about being number one at state for that...Matt, Mike, John, Harrison...there could not have been a greater honor going for those four. (Usually it is the girls who win, so these boys were just thrilled that they did it this year.) Matt finished with two medals last evening...a fourth in the 200 Back and a second for their 400 Freestyle Relay (just could not contain Kevin Behrens in either one of those), nevertheless, it was still a Top 16 National Time. 
The photos here (click on all photos to enlarge) show Matt and Kevin standing at the blocks getting ready to swim...Matt is almost 6'2", and you can see Kevin is well above that in height and stature...he is just some force out there. The next photo shows how far ahead Kevin was right at the beginning...count from the bottom of the photo and Matt is in Lane 3, Kevin in Lane 4...it was no contest...Kevin just never looked back...it was such fun to see such a great swimmer doing what he does best: swim! Matt's 200 Freestyle swim in the prelims in the morning netted only a consolation swim, so he ended up with a 12th place finish in that swim. Not bad, 8 medals out of a possible 9...we are thinking that is a very fine showing for someone who manages to swim and sing! The real question is: Can we keep this up...next year Matt will be in the senior division of swimming and also be in two choirs: IYC and Guerin. I am thinking we better enjoy all this hardware while we can. So now Age Group is a thing of the past...on to the Open swimming and rebuilding as he starts at the bottom of the senior group and builds toward the top to hopefully be "one of the big guys" again. This weekend he proved he finished Age Group as one of the "big guys" for sure! It was a lot of fun to watch.
After the finals, the swimmers and their families were lucky enough to have a Carrabbas restaurant cook for all of us as we took over the restaurant to celebrate and enjoy some Italian fare. It felt like a big family...as I looked around and saw all the swimmers and families that we have grown to know and love over the past eight years, it felt really really nice to be in that place at that time with all those people. How lucky are we to have had this all these years? Each and every one of those families was not only excited for their swimmer, but for each and every swimmer on that state team. The kids are really lucky to have so many people come up and say how proud they were of them and how much they enjoyed watching them swim, etc. It was really wonderful.