Good evening everyone. Welcome to Long Island. Since we spent so much time here between the Holiday meet, States and other meets it seems appropriate that our dinner ended up on Long Island this year. I'd like to welcome parents, swimmers, relatives, our alumni, honored guests – Rich and Verne, Annie and Harry, Executive Director of the Y – William Nelson, his Executive Assistant, Jean Vesnaver, our Business Manager, Debbie Weick, our Aquatic Director – Josh Stabenfeldt, my fellow coaches and friends. It is time again to congratulate you on your success and achievements and recognize our high school seniors for all their years of devotion and commitment to the YMCA.
As we continue to work to understand life and how complex it is, we continue to grow and mature. We seem to get tested week after week, month after month and year after year. I am very proud of everyone, their commitment to the YMCA, their commitment to swimming and their continued desire to succeed both in and out of the pool. So let's recap and celebrate another year of great swimming and honor our high school seniors and their families. I apologize in advance for any omissions, errors or anyone I offend.
I'd like to give special thanks to Jonah, Shirley, Matt, James and Tim for their great coaching. As we continued to shuffle around this year, my co-coaches rose to the occasion, continuing to teach the YMCA values and continuing to turn out great swimmers, to Heather who did a great job coaching the “Development” team, to our parent committee members, officers and all the parents who worked at our swim meets and to all those that contributed items to the web site, to Dan Collins who took charge of the officials this year and to all the officials that volunteered to work at our meets, to Tom Mammano who has served on the board for many years, has run the computer at all our swim meets and has trained the current group that we have but has been forced to take a step back at this time, to Karin Guelly, Mary Leong and Dan Collins for being great chaperones at Nationals, to Elisa Pickel for securing Jericho Terrace for the dinner and Elisa and Karin for continuing to keep our parent organization as good as any around, to Debbie and Jean for supporting us and helping us in any way they can, to William and Josh who in just a few short months have made the YMCA a much better place to be for all of us, to Michael Lim who continues to keep our web site most interesting and informative and to my wife and children for their support and their new found interest in the sport (they ask me how we did when I come home from a meet now and my daughters are at that age where if I come home with a story they actually want to listen to it).
I'd like to start off with our attendance awards. This year we are recognizing everyone whose attendance is over 90% and we'd like them to come up and get their awards -
For the 10 & unders – Rebecca, Yee Chung, Felix, Kevin, Justin and Alan
For the 11-12's – Annys, Jennifer, Emma, Samantha, Mateo and Joey Grippo
For the 13 & overs – Priscilla, Sally, Danny, Matt, Billy, Cody and Daniel.
Congratulations to all of you.
Now for a quick recap and please hold your applause. We had 11 swimmers at Empire Games last summer – Lauren, Diana, Sally, Paula, Joyce, Deirdre, Matt, Danny, Billy, Stefan and Dan. We had 9 swimmers with 29 top 10 rankings in Metropolitan swimming -Jasmin P, Jordan P, Jennifer, Joyce, Steven, Kevin, Joe M, One June and Matt C. In the Toyota Virtual Club Championships we are ranked 9 th in Metro out of 66 teams and 182 nd in the country out of 2,459 US Swim Clubs. We won 7 of 8 age groups at Y Cities and 4 out of 10 at States. We had 10 individual State Champions winning 16 events – Jennifer, Kirsten, Joe, Joyce, Steven, One June, Lauren, Kevin, Matt and Stefan. We won 6 relays and 22 out of 24 finished 1 st , 2 nd or 3 rd . Jennifer, Matt and One June won High Point awards at the Big Apple meet. Paula, Kirsten and One June qualified for Sectionals. Joyce and Jennifer won High Point awards at the Fran Schnarr Sprint meet. We continued to dominate High School swimming throughout the City and part of Nassau County . I won't read all their names but all 46 of our High School swimmers were stars on their High School teams. Townsend Harris with seven of our swimmers won the girls City Championship this year. Bayside won the Queens Championship led by Billy. Kirsten finished tenth in the 100 fly at High School States. Paula Guzman won the Pegasus award given to the Outstanding PSAL female swimmer for the second year in a row and won the Heisman/Wingate award given to the outstanding graduating senior.
We have some Alumni here tonight and I'd like to give them a warm welcome, Cara Mangino, Alexandra Mercurio and Maureen McCluskey.
At this time I would have liked to call up by age group all swimmers to get their participation awards but they won't be here until next week so you will get them at practice.