Whitehall had two swimmers make it through to the PIAA Swimming and Diving championships at Bucknell University, which was held late last week. Seniors Ian Thomas and Aaron Stinner, who both made edits to the school’s record book this past season, qualified in two events each.

Thomas had the highest finish of the two day event for 3A swimmers when he swam the 50-yard freestyle in a time of 20.98 to qualify for the medal round in the eighth and final spot. The top 14 finishers were all within 0.86 seconds of each other with Thomas finishing 0.68 seconds out of the top spot and just 0.12 seconds out of fourth. The event was so close that places six through nine all finished 0.01 seconds behind the person in front of them, meaning that Thomas almost missed reaching the medal finals.

When Thomas swam in the event later, the scores were a little more spread out and he was able to move from eighth to sixth with a time of 20.75 seconds, just 0.50 seconds behind the gold medal winner.

Thomas swam in the 100-yard freestyle on day two and finished 14th in the preliminaries and moved up a spot in the finals to finish tied for 13th after cutting 0.13 off his time from the preliminaries and finishing in 46.56 seconds.

“I’m happy with how I ended because the prelims didn’t really go my way,” admitted Thomas who has been battling a biceps injury. “I started to get in my own head because I didn’t really execute and after all the work that I put in, it kind of stinks. Seeing the results I had in the prelims, I’m happy because I was able to shake it off.”

Stinner swam in the 200 and 500-yard freestyle events. The 200 was the first event of the meet and Stinner finished with a time of 1:44.34, putting him 20th. On Thursday, the senior swimmer finished 21st in the 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4:43.20.

The tie in the 100-freestyle left the Zephyrs with 16.5 team points, just 0.5 points ahead of Liberty with Whitehall finishing 34th and Liberty 35th. Emmaus was the highest scoring local team with 36 points in 17th. Finishing behind Whitehall was Parkland (five points) in a tie for 51st, and Nazareth (four points) tied for 53rd.