Horns swimmers prepared for Canada West Championship

By Lethbridge Herald on November 25, 2022.

By Justin Seward

Lethbridge Herald

The University of Lethbridge Pronghorns swimming team are set to host the Canada West Championship this weekend at Max Bell Aquatic Centre.

“We’re pretty excited,” said head coach Peter Schori.

“It’s great to have this meet at home, and normally we only get it every five years and something came up in Victoria. So we jumped at the chance to host it. We feel great about our team and it’s a meet that there is  team scoring. Realistically ,when we’ve got UBC and University of Calgary and some of the programs in our conference, we’re not going to win Canada West. But what we can win are individual events and relay events.”

This will be Schori’s 11th trip and third time as host in the Canada West Championship.

“Like coaches love to say that a swim meet is a swim meet or a basketball game is a basketball game and it’s just another game,” said Schori.

“But the reality is this is a special swim meet,right. There’s more of a sense of team than there is any other swim competition, which is really exciting.”

The women Horns are ranked 10th in the country and the men are fifth.

“As great as our rankings our, seven of the top 11 teams in Canada are in Canada West. So it’s a super deep conference which means there will be a lot of good racing.”

“I think we’re going to swim great,” said Schori.

“We’ve got some individuals that have a chance to defend championships from last year.”

Apollo Hess won the Canada West last year in the 50 and 200-metre breaststrokes and Schori thinks he would like to add a medial in the 100-metre breast stroke.

Schori will look to see if Chris Alexander can finally get on top of the podium.

The women have up and coming swimmers that Schori thinks will add to the finalist the team had last year.

Ryenne Katterhagen and Hunter Stewardson are in the top 10.

“We’ve got expectations that I think match their preparation,” said Schori.

“And they’ve done a good job on their preparation.”

Horns’ swimmer Taryn Lachman felt the championship wil be nerve-wracking and exciting at the same time.

“We’ve been training super hard, everybody’s been swimming super-fast,” she said.

“But there’s always the stress of trying to get cuts for other bigger meets to go to, as well we want to win those medals, we want to get first place (and) we want to be doing our best. So there’s always the nerves going into a big meet like this. But it’s more exciting than I would say nervous.”

Parker Brown feels the team is pretty connected right now in building off each other and having a lot of energy.

“Especially for our relays,” he said.

“We have the same team (this) year and (last) year. We have a lot of energy off of that and there’s a bunch of new rookies that are really good that are contributing as well.”

 Swimmers will qualify for nationals in this event by their time.

U of L lasted hosted the championship in 2019. The Canada West Champinship is Nov. 25-27. Tickets are availabvle at gohorns.ca.