VANCOUVER – After three days, 40 events and nearly 750 swimmers hitting the water inside the UBC Aquatic Centre, the dust has now settled on another fantastic edition of the Mel Zajac Jr. International Swim Meet.
"The local community really supports this meet well, as well as B.C. and Canada," said a happy
Derrick Schoof, T-Birds head coach. "It's so great to have the U.S. Junior National Team up here, as well as swimmers like Kylie Masse, Josh Liendo, Santo Condorelli…there were some big players who came here so we're thrilled about it.
"We had three new meet records, and those are really hard meet records, so the fact that we got three of them we're really thrilled about that."
Masse provided one of those records in the second race of Sunday's finals, touching the wall in the Women's 100m Backstroke with a time of 59.50 seconds, bettering the previous mark of 1:00.01 that had been set by Masse herself earlier in the morning preliminaries.
A similar story unfolded in the Women's 100m Freestyle, when American junior national team swimmer Liberty Clark broke the meet record with a 53.70 in the prelims only to then follow it up with a 53.66 in the finals – a full two seconds ahead of her closest competitor.
Yuri Kisil was the top performing Thunderbird on the day as he won the Men's 100m Freestyle with a time of 50.14, beating out a highly competitive field that included fellow T-Bird
Jake Gaunt in third place (50.69).
Both Kisil and Gaunt anchored UBC relay teams in the meet-closing Men's 4x100m Medley, with Gaunt's squad of himself,
Kai Lilienthal,
Justice Migneault and
Wells Ginzer (3:43.95) earning silver behind the American junior nationals. The group of
Joran Orogo,
Sebastian van de Logt,
Frank Ho and Kisil finished behind them in third (3:47.08).
On the women's side, the UBC 4x100m relay team of
Bridget Burton,
Eloise Allen,
Benya Mattig and
Kayla Sanchez also placed second (4:10.87), with Sanchez providing a blazing fast anchor leg to secure their spot on the podium – swimming the freestyle portion of the race in just 53.29 seconds, a hair faster than Clark's meet record in the official 100m event!
In the women's individual races, Allen also earned a third-place finish in the 50m Breaststroke (32.30).
The T-Birds will now turn their attention to the 2026 Canadian Swimming Trials in Montreal, where top athletes from across the country will compete to earn a spot on the national team roster for the upcoming Pan Pacific Swimming Championships in August.
"This was a real litmus test to see where they're at right now, four weeks prior to trials," remarked Schoof on his Thunderbird athletes. "They raced really well this weekend, I'm quite happy with where they're at, especially considering the workload that they've been under.
"Watching them, I can see that we have really good fitness, now we just need to sharpen them up. We need to get them a bit more rested so they can get some easy speed, and do some specific race rehearsal and race preparation work over the next few weeks."
The swimming trials will be held from July 5 to 9, with the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships hosted in Irvine, California from August 12 to 15.
