Video: Jordan Taylor Interview
JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. – As the 2020-21 season regular season comes to a close in the coming weeks, the Carson-Newman swim team will host its annual Blue vs. Orange Intrasquad meet on Friday, Jan. 22nd in the MSAC pool. Start time is scheduled for 5:00 p.m. The series is currently tied 2-2 between Blue and Orange. Who breaks the tie Friday night?
The race gives the Eagles a semi-break between hosting Emmanuel College on Jan. 30th and Lees-McRae on Feb. 6th to wrap up the 2020-21 season. This year's teams will be led by the Eagles assistant coaches (Evan Pinion, Ksenia Neydenova, Ben Young, and Sara Duarte Garcia), respectively.
The format for the intrasquad meet will require the senior captains to draft their own teams and look at the strengths and weaknesses when generating and choosing their events. It gets the team starting to think a little more when picking lineups, giving them an opportunity and insight on the coaching thought process which Jordan Taylor and the coaches go through each week.
"Blue v. Orange started five years ago in hopes of getting our freshman acquainted with the team. This year, with all the craziness, it is one of the last meets this year. Pushing it back to the Spring also allows for us to have more athletes available and ready to compete," coach Jordan Taylor said. "The series is now tied 2-2, and it is almost always very competitive as the depth of the roster continues to grow. This separation of our team into two helps me as the coach to see where we are as a squad with multiple swimmers ranked in the top-10."
In last year's event, the blue team broke a two-meet losing streak to the orange team, defeating them by a score of 230-184. The men of the blue team won 127-83 while the women kept it close but pulled out the 103-101 victory.
Arguably the most exciting of the events of that meet occurred in the final event when both the women and men 200-yard medley relays squared off against each other, resulting in wins by a mere couple of seconds.
The blue team of Natalia Amano, Kailee Morgan, CJ Jensen, and Mary Northcutt were the victors in their event with a time of 1:49.15, right in front of the 1:50.28 time put in by the orange 'A' team.
The follow-up event for the men gave Caleb Howell, Chad Andoljsek, Matthew George, and Brandon Meier of the blue team a victory time of 1:34.17. The orange 'A' men's team finished in 1:35.78.
Taylor is hoping to use this unique opportunity to not only better his team as they get closer to Conference and National Championships but push forward his message of "controlling what is in front of them, one day at a time."
"From my experience, these meets are competitive full of inside trash talking. The fact that it is an intense and close competition as we get to events where close finishes are inevitable," Taylor said. "They always swim for the team but swimming for a smaller sized team pushes them to find success as we close our season. We're at a point where we battle for conference titles and we need to learn how to win."
You can find updates and a recap following the event on cneagles.com. Follow @CNAthletics or @CNSWIM on Twitter and Instagram.
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