UNION TWP. | On Friday afternoon, Bishop Noll swim coach Pam Armagast took the Warriors to the pool located inside their high school.
The Warriors weren't there to practice, as the pool was empty. It has been for well over a decade. The Warriors currently practice at Calumet High School.
Armagast took her swimmers on a field trip to their own school to make a point.
They got down into the pool and stood on the dry tile and listened to their coach.
"I said, 'This is where we're coming from,'" Armagast said. "We looked at the record boards. I said, 'We can rewrite this. Let's rewrite history.'"
The Noll boys swim team did just that on Saturday, when it beat Wheeler to win its first-ever Greater South Shore Conference Championship by a score of 426-380.
The Warriors set new meet records in five events en route to the win. Two of those records were broken by Wally Kaspyzcki, in the 100-yard fly (1:03.22) and the 100 back (1:00.95). Kaspyzcki also was a part of the record-breaking 200 medley relay (1:52.42).
Noll's Steven Jackson broke the conference meet record in the 200 IM (2:17.60), while Jake Miller set a new meet mark in the 500 free (5:38.31).
"Our pool's been closed for 15 years," said Armagast, who is in her second year at Noll. "We hadn't even won a conference race (before Saturday)."
She said she wanted to give her team an appreciation of Noll's swimming tradition, pointing out that the year she graduated from Munster High School in 1981, the Noll boys swim team won the state championship.
To show that recognition of history, the team brought the flags from Noll's empty high school pool to Wheeler on Saturday and hung them from the wall of the pool deck. The Warriors also brought what little water they could salvage from the bottom of the deep end at Bishop Noll and poured it into Wheeler's pool so they had a small piece of home with them.
"I told them, 'If we do this, we're going to do it right,'" Armagast said. "I told them we're bringing it back."
Wheeler's girls team won its third straight GSSC meet, beating runner-up North Newton 477-352.
The Bearcats were led by Amanda Janda, who set a new conference meet record in the 200 IM (2:23.29) and took first place in the 500 free (5:49.16). Janda was also a part of the winning 200 medley and 200 free relays.
"They did a really good job, better than I expected," Wheeler coach Adam Klimczak said. "We haven't started our taper, we had a hard practice on Friday. I wanted to use this meet as a gauge to see where we're at."
PREP SWIMMING | GSSC MEET
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