Aloha from the NCSA All-American Meet

By Jason Marsteller

HONOLULU, Hawaii, June 4. GREETINGS from Honolulu, Hawaii, the location of the inaugural NCSA All-American meet this week. I will be providing journal entries throughout this week's activities as an "embedded" observer with the assorted team members.

First off, meet organizer Bob Gillett deserves a lot of credit for getting nearly 90 total people over to Hawaii for a fun week of training and competition. As I write, he's still picking up swimmers and coaches from the airport!

The LAX terminal hosting the flights to Hawaii was dominated by swimmers in a bigger fashion than most college teams. Each one of the swimmers has been gracious as I have begun to build our Swimming World Radio introduction packages. Instead of doing a radio piece talking about each swimmer, we decided to let the athletes introduce themselves, while also talking about something interesting about them that people might not know. Talk about some great little tidbits from everyone.

A few thoughts to consider about these road warriors that found their way to LAX from all over the country:

* The New York Trinity of Lauren and Lindsey Norberg and Logan Todhunter, who swim for Ithaca Aquatics, owned the most time spent in the airport as they arrived at LAX at 12:15 a.m. Sunday morning. We didn't leave until around 6:30 p.m., so they spent more than a day traveling.

* The swimmers from the Big Ten Conference regions like Team Foxjet out of Minnesota welcomed me with open arms (being that I worked at Indiana University before making my way to Swimming World Magazine.) And, just so that everyone knew – Curt Carlson of Team Foxjet made sure the ladies knew he was available as his interesting tidbit in the introductions was that he was single.

* My final thought before I hit the sack before starting up at 6:30 a.m. for the first morning of workouts – Shane Lichtenberg of the Oakland Live Y'ers truly proved he will be the swimming tour guide of the trip when he was greeted at the Baggage Claim by family. He's already logged several trips to the islands in his past. Thanks to his family, I received a lei as soon as I walked into the area. Thanks, Shane's relative!

Keep yourself posted to the web site over the upcoming week to keep an eye on the goings-on at the NCSA All-American meet!

* And, just for fun, the quote of the day: Lamp…shade…Lampshade. That's just for the swimmers that are here. Talk about some interesting inside jokes that happen at a function like this.

If you have anything specific you'd like me to focus and report on, please click here to drop me a note. I will do my best to respond to reader requests.

2007 NCSA All-American Meet

2007 NCSA All-American Meet

2007 NCSA All-American Meet

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