Submitted photo – The contingent of local swimmers who qualified for last year’s NCS championships.
By Ray Hamill — A group of groundbreaking H-DNL swimmers will take center stage over the next two weekends, as the sport continues to grow in stature here on the North Coast.
On Saturday afternoon, the league teams will host the first of back-to-back meets at Cal Poly Humboldt, with North Coast Section qualifying on the line.
This weekend, three league teams — Arcata, Eureka and Del Norte — will compete at the CPH pool, and the following Saturday teams from Fort Bragg and Mendocino high schools will join them.
The action gets under way at 3 p.m. on both days and will feature a full slate of 22 races, 11 for the boys and 11 for the girls.
This year, the Tigers have 11 swimmers on their roster, while the Loggers feature six, and both teams will be hoping to advance some of their swimmers to the upcoming NCS meet.
“We have decent numbers for swimming not being a super known high school sport in the county just yet,” said Jacob Ireland, who is the head coach of both Arcata and Eureka. “This is only the third year both schools have a team, but kids are starting to hear about it for the first time and each year the numbers grow steadily.
“We’re hoping that two or three years from now we’ll have double digits for both schools.”
The growth of the sport at the high school level locally can be seen with the addition of a Del Norte team this year.
The Warriors, who feature six swimmers on their roster, are competing as an exhibition team, but the hope is that with three official teams next year they can all begin competing as a league in the near future.
“Hopefully we can expand to make it an official league,” Ireland said. “That’s the goal.”
Bringing in teams from Mendocino County for next week’s local meet for the second straight year will help to establish the sport at the high school level here on the North Coast.
“We’ll have five schools total (at next week’s meet), and that’s pretty awesome to see,” Ireland said.
After qualifying five H-DNL swimmers for the NCS a year ago, Ireland is hoping to match that number again this spring.
Four Arcata boys — Yogi Trieu, Bryson Meyer, Huck Russell and Nathan Bareilles — qualified for sections in the medley relay in 2025, matching the total number of Tigers to reach the NCS in the previous 15 years combined.
Eureka’s Amalia Baugh also qualified last year in both the 200 free and 100 butterfly, becoming the first Logger to compete in NCS in more than 15 years, and the hope is she can match that feat again this year.
Trieu and Russell are back with the Tigers this year and also are hoping to replicate their NCS qualification in the medley relay along with teammates Teodor Demirev and Henry Seiler.
The growing popularity in the sport locally can also be seen with the fact the Humboldt Swim Club, which practices at the Arcata pool, has 110 members between the ages of 6 and 18 this year.
