On a sunny October morning, the Girls Varsity Swim Team traveled to L’anse Creuse North High School to participate in the annual Macomb County Swimming and Diving Championship Meet. While most of the girls at the meet were focused on swimming their personal best times, others were focused on swimming some of the best times that their school has ever seen, which is exactly what Sydney Heisler ’17 did.

Not only did she swim her best time in the 100 Backstroke, but she also broke the school record for this event. The previous record was set in 2008 at a time of 1:06:03 and Sydney’s time was 1:04:60.
It takes a lot of training and dedication to reach times like this, and Sydney has quite a few years of swimming under her belt that helped her to get to the place that she’s at. “I started swimming for Pointe Aquatics when I was nine years old and swam for them for two years and then switched to the OLY (Oakland Live Y’ers) club team.”

Once she started swimming for Tower, Sydney continued to take the sport seriously and trained just as hard as she did during club swim. “In the off season (from high school swim) I trained with a trainer and boxed. I also took some cardio classes to help with endurance. Then, once high school swim started, I tried to be in the pool as much as possible.”

Not only did Sydney go through a lot of physical preparation to reach her goal, but she also experienced some mental preparation along the way. “I knew what my time needed to be in order to beat the record. At every practice I would look at our board and memorized the time for motivation.”
With all of the practices and motivation that she had before competing at the county meet, Sydney felt more than ready to swim her heart out when she stepped into the pool to swim the 100 backstroke.

As she was swimming, she applied everything that she has learned over the years on how to swim your fastest time possible, and when she finished her race and looked up at the scoreboard, she was overwhelmed with joy. “I knew as soon as I looked at the board and saw my time that I broke the school record and I was so excited that I reached my goal!”

Although 1:04:60 is Sydney’s best time in the 100 backstroke, she is hoping to reach an even faster time of 1:02 in order to qualify for the state meet by the end of the season. Since she also has two years left on the swim team, she is hoping to break the school records in the 100 freestyle, 200 IM, and any of the three relay events (200 medley, 200 freestyle, and 400 freestyle). Congratulations on your achievement, Sydney, and good luck in the future!

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