WOODBURY—With the winter season now officially in the rear view, NHS swim is still feeling the reverberations of a historic finish.
Seniors, Grace Rubacha and Emily Stewart; junior Aubrey Waldron, and sophomore Catherine Viveros, competed together all season to try and break the record for their relay race.
Aubrey Waldron, NHS junior who runs the last leg of the 400 Free, noticed during a meet earlier in the season that beating the record was a possibility.
“At Splash,(an in-season swim tournament) an all-girls race, we realized that we actually have a good chance of breaking the record,” Waldron said. “We were only 0.2 off from breaking it, so after that we kept trying to break it through the season, and then we tried at BL’s, but on our last shot we finally broke it at finals.”
Grace Rubacha, an NHS senior, who swam first in states, believes that breaking this record showed the group’s overall improvement.
“I think it showed a lot of our improvement throughout the season,” Rubacha said. “We’ve all been working on our individual events but I always enjoy relays a lot more, so coming together and seeing proof of how hard we worked in practice is a really fun moment.”
Along with Rubacha, Nonnewaug sophomore Cathrine Viveros, notes how this season was especially important for her.
“Especially this season it was really important to me, because this was our last opportunity to get the new record,” Viveros said. “The four of us have been working really hard in the past competitions to get this time, and I feel like all the work we put towards it really paid off.”
With high pressure comes higher nerves. However, even with nerves, Waldron knew her and her teammates could finish the job.
“I was the last person to go so getting the record was pretty much all on me,” Waldron said. “I work really well under pressure though, so having the motivation to go faster so I can do it for my team, really helped me mentally prepare for the race.”
The Nonnewaug swim team has had a season to remember, breaking both the 400 and the 200 free relay.
The previous record was set in the 2023-24 swim season by Grace Walkup (‘25),Olivia Bernardi,(‘25) Grace Rubacha, and Emily Stewart, their time was 4:05:01, this season they broke it by only 0.0039 seconds with a time of 4:04:62.
Emily Stewart, NHS senior who was also in the relay during the previous set record, was proud that they could finally complete what they had been striving to do all season.
“It meant a lot,” Stewart said. “We’ve been trying to do it all season, and we finally got it on our last race.”
