With little less than a month left, the Boy’s Varsity swim has successfully accomplished one of their biggest goals this season. Friday, Jan. 20, Vanya Canak, Aleks Piljevic, Nicholas Dao, and Ethan Chung, sophomores and freshmen on the team, broke the 400 freestyle relay record.

The last record was broken in 2009 with a time of three minutes and 27 seconds, however, the swimmers pushed through and managed to get three minutes and 24 seconds. On average that is 51 seconds per swimmer. The average speed per swimmer for a 400 relay is one minute to 91 seconds.  On top of that, the three seconds that resulted in them breaking the record would’ve never happened without hard work and practice.

They were able to break this goal because of their dedication and consistency throughout the season. Sophomore Piljevic believes that while practices required hard work, it was all worth it.

“Having training two times a day for two times a week is pretty challenging, but with all this comes an outcome, a good outcome which is breaking many records,” Piljevic said.

Freshman Dao expresses how it felt at the moment of this huge accomplishment and what led up to it.

“After reaching this accomplishment I was super happy. We worked very hard to achieve this goal [and] our whole team was super excited that we got the record. All four of us work super hard at practice and pushed ourselves when we are doing our workouts.  Also, whenever our coaches tell us problems about our strokes, we spend lots of time fixing them and improving during the races, so all four of us expected to get the record. We are all very fast and we knew that we could beat the record with no problem,” Dao said.

As these boys have a couple more years left at West, they are expecting to beat more records. Sophomore Canak, explains how one of the team goals hits personally to him.“We are expecting to break all three records so a 200-free relay will be our next goal. it’ll be kind of funny to break it because my brother’s on that record so to take him off will be kind of funny,” Canak said. 

As Canak has been swimming his whole life, he gives some wise words that have been helping him stay motivated in his swimming successes.

“Just never give up. Obviously, when you play a sport you’ve been doing for so long, there are going to be times when you feel unmotivated.  [At times] you feel like you’re not improving or you want to quit, but don’t quit because all the negativity is going to pay off. You need to motivate yourself from the hate and keep improving and improving until the point where you’re going to hit that spot and hit that goal. From this, you will feel so proud of yourself and you will set new goals,” Canak said.

With one meet left of the season, the boys are still working hard to finish this season off strong. Come out on Feb. 3rd for the next home meet against the Wildkits, and cheer the boys on.