State College girls swimming’s Jade Castro takes home silver medal in PIAA state championships
State College’s Jade Castro entered the 2022 PIAA Class 3A swimming and diving championships with a goal of beating out Upper Dublin’s Meghan DiMartile in the 100-yard backstroke.
The two have built a friendly rivalry, after DiMartile’s time of 54.31 beat out Castro (54.53) for the 2021 state championship in the event. Both DiMartile (54.13) and Castro (54.33) finished with better times and the same result.
With a silver medal in hand Thursday night at Bucknell, Castro was proud of her ability to inch closer to her ultimate goal of a state title as a senior next season.
“Last year, I didn’t get to race right next to Megan,” Castro said. “So, I was super excited to get to race right next to her because we swam the race completely differently. Coming into finals tonight, I just really wanted to put my head down, get to that wall as fast as I could and hopefully come home with a first, second or third place finish. I really just wanted to focus on my own race rather than everyone else’s around me.”
Castro also finished fourth in the 200-yard individual medley (2:03.21), trailing Fox Chapel’s Sophie Shao (2:03.09) in third, Hatboro-Horsham’s Kathy Jia (2:01.36) in second and Haverford’s Katya Eruslanova (2:00.09) in first on Wednesday. State College’s girls team finished 12th, scoring 67 points. Hatboro-Horsham finished No. 1 with 227 points. Castro, Mackenzie Pagett, Ally Koehle and Madison Watschke finished fourth in the 200-yard medley finals with a time of 1:45.61. The girls 200-yard freestyle relay team of Watschke, Castro, Ditta Kowalik and Kelly Brownstead finished with a disqualification in the finals on Thursday.
Boys finish 13th at states
The boys team placed 13th in the state with 57 points, four places above their 2021 finish. Head coach Aaron Workman discussed his team’s improvement on the boys side and how close his girls team came to placing higher.
“We competed really well,” Workman said. “For the most part, the entire team had lifetime bests. It was a lot of excitement – we broke two team records and came really close to a team record on the boys side. So, it was just a pretty successful season that culminated in some great swims. Top-15 finish for us on the guys side and the girls meet. We had a top-15 finish there and unfortunately, we had a slip up with a DQ on the relay, but with those points, we would’ve been up where we needed to be. It was a really great meet.”
The boys began their meet on Thursday with a 10th place (1:36.59) finish in the 200-yard medley relay with the team of Tyler Uhlig, John Brownstead, Shawn Erdley, and Sam Huggins. Huggins finished 15th (1:44.45) in the 200-yard freestyle. John Brownstead had an 11th place (21.36) finish in the 50-yard freestyle. John Brownstead finished eighth in the boys 100-yard freestyle with a time of 46.01. Sam Huggins placed 16th in the boys 500-yard freestyle had a time of 4:39.12. Shawn Erdley was sixth in the 100-yard breaststroke (56.85) and the team of Huggins, Erik Witt, Uhlig and John Brownstead placed 10th (3:11.17) in the 400-yard freestyle relay.
John Brownstead looks forward to the competition that each season brings. The stakes aren’t any higher than the state championships and bring the best out of many of the swimmers. He believes that competing against the best of the best brought out his fighting spirit in his respective races.
“I feel like both of my races were pretty good,” Brownstead said. “I feel like there’s always stuff that you can fix in those and I’ll be working on it next time, but the competition that I had at this meet was great. It pushed me a lot – just going out with everyone. The competition was really nice.”
Bellefonte, Penns Valley and Saint Joe’s will compete Friday in the 2A state championships at Bucknell.
