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ALLENTOWN: Owens happy with final MCT swim

Senior endured ups and downs

By Justin Feil, The Packet Group
   Allentown High School senior Taylor Owens seems destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
   ”That’s not such a bad thing,” said Taylor’s mother, Pam, the Robbinsville High School swimming coach. “She’s got a lot of those leadership qualities. She’s got a strong personality.”
   Pam teaches kindergarten, and Taylor is interested in pursuing a teaching degree in special education, and eventually coaching on the side.
   ”I’ll probably be just like her,” Taylor said.
   Owens grew up in the pool while her mother coached and never got away from it, even when an injured shoulder tried to force her out of the sport prematurely. Owens was 4 when she took off the tube around her waist that kept her afloat, and for 13 years her mother has been coaching her, up through the youth ranks, with the Cranbury Catfish, Peddie Aquatics and the first Robbinsville swim team.
   ”It’s had its ups and downs,” Taylor said with a smile. “I could not have done anything without her. She’s probably my No. 1 motivation in this sport because she swam her whole life. We go back and forth.”
   Both could agree that it was the perfect ending at the Mercer County Championships on Saturday. When Owens hit the wall in second place in the consolation final of the girls 100 backstroke, a smile broke out when she saw her time and place.
   ”It meant a lot to me,” said Owens, who was just off the 1:14.56 season-best time that she swam in Thursday’s preliminaries. “Just finishing the season this way was a complete accomplishment for me. I could not be any happier with how I finished, any happier with how I did. I came here and did what I wanted to do.”
   It was part of a solid showing for Robbinsville, which was missing several swimmers after the Allentown finals and Robbinsville midterms — pushed back as a result of Superstorm Sandy — conflicted with the county preliminaries.
   Robbinsville’s girls finished ninth with 76 points. Taylor Johnson won the 100 breaststroke in 1:18.03, almost a second ahead of the runner-up. Johnson was also second in the 200 individual medley. The senior will swim both of those events at the Meet of Champions that she has qualified for all four years of her high school career. Jillian Galindo won the consolation final of the girls 200 IM and raced in the consolation heat of the 400 free. Kelly Whitlock was an alternate in the 100 breaststroke.
   Robbinsville scored 24½ points on the boys’ side. Mark Dawes and Rohan Bajaj both reached the consolation finals of the 200 free. Dawes was also in the 100 free consolation final. Bajaj missed the 400 free consolation final by nine-hundredths of a second.
   ”If you’re going to miss, that’s kind of hard,” Pam Owens said. “But they were fantastic swims for the boys.
   ”Kelly Whitlock was coming off illness, that’s a hard thing, but she’s a freshman. She has time. I’m looking for great things from my freshmen building into next year. I thought we had pretty good swims.”
   In the highs and lows that Pam and Taylor Owens have shared, Saturday’s finish was up there on the highs. Never before had Taylor reached an individual final.
   ”It’s been a great experience working with her and seeing her come so far,” Pam said. “This has been a great experience seeing her at counties making finals her senior year, especially coming off a shoulder injury. We didn’t think she’d be able to make it through this season.
   ”She had to leave swimming last year. We didn’t think she’d be able to return. She worked so hard since last summer, a lot of therapy, coming back and being here is just phenomenal. For a coach and being her mom seeing her make it, be here, swim and get a best time, the all-round coach/mom experience is phenomenal. It’s been great.”
   It will be a highlight to the moments and memories the two have shared around the pool, and whisk away some of those moments that they’ve had after they’ve left the pool.
   ”If we get in trouble at practice, I’m the one that has to carry it home the entire night,” Taylor said. “She could wake up the next morning still upset, and I’d be the one that still gets it because I live with her. At the same time, she is the best coach I could ever ask for. I’m not just saying that because she’s my mom. She’s probably the best coach I’ve ever had throughout my 13 years of swimming.
   ”She actually watches our potential, she tells us everything we do wrong to make us better, she knows exactly what to tell us before every race.”
   Pam had already seen an encouraging preliminary swim Thursday when Saturday’s swim came. It helped to erase the low that came midway through the year when Pam told Taylor she couldn’t swim anymore. Taylor’s shoulder had popped out of socket on swims. But sitting out some meets only reinforced how much Taylor loved the sport.
   ”When my mom took me out of a couple meets this season, I was actually upset even though they were some of the easier meets,” Taylor said. “Knowing I couldn’t swim in those meets really upset me. Sophomore year, when my club coach told me go to your orthopedic, and he said, you can’t swim for six months, I broke down crying and said, you can’t do this to me.”
   Physical therapy helped Owens return to the pool, and this year, she combined therapy and a lot of help from team trainer Brian Irwin to return for the county meet. Taylor stopped swimming the freestyle that was shredding her shoulder and focused on the backstroke.
   ”Him working with me and believing in her, I owe him a lot of credit for his belief in her and seeing what would work for her and giving us the support he did,” Pam said. “It was the turning point for us. Him using that tape to hold that shoulder in place. That was the ah-ha moment in place. The shoulder kept slipping out of socket. The one meet it totally went.”
   Taylor willed herself back into the pool in the final portion of the year. Her only goal was to reach the county finals.
   ”The past two weeks, I took a step back and took a look at myself and said, ‘If you want to make it to the finals, you have to go to these practices,’” she said. “I did exactly what my mom asked me to do every practice and I did what I had to at home, I went to sleep early, I ate the right things, I got myself mentally prepared, I iced my shoulder every single day and iced and heated it, iced it, shoulder exercises, everything I was supposed to all season just to make it here on Saturday.”
   A pep talk from Irwin stayed with her through counties, along with the black K-tape that looked like a giant spider squashed under her suit over her shoulder. The tape held up and so did Taylor.
   ”Everything he said I kept repeating it in my head over and over to myself,” Taylor said. “He was my biggest motivation, my biggest inspiration in this meet. I could not have done this without him. Knowing this was my last meet as a high school swimmer meant everything to me and I wanted to go out of it with people remembering who I was and people saying, she’s a senior and she made something out of herself.”
   Taylor was a statistician for the Allentown football team for four years, and she has been playing bagpipes — following in her father’s footsteps — since she was in fourth grade. The bagpipes will follow her to college; now swimming may as well.
   ”I thought it would be it, and now she’s toying with it in college,” Pam said. “I’m not sure I’m happy about that. I don’t want her to ruin her shoulder. I’d be happy if she was just bag-piping.”