Golden Moments
UPPER ST. CLAIR -- David Bocci set the plan in place for his two victories at the WPIAL Class AAA boys swimming championships long before the race Sunday at Upper St. Clair High School.
The Golden Tornado senior and his teammates altered their training to be in the best position to advance to the PIAA Championships. Due to coronavirus restrictions, only swimmers who won district titles, plus the top eight fastest times from around the state would qualify for states.
“We never put on tech suits in the middle of the season, normally, but this year we wanted to get high seed times to get good lanes,” Bocci said. “First of all, we didn't know how many people they were taking to this meet. Once we figured that out, we wanted to get high seed times to get good lanes.”
Bocci — along with several other Butler County swimmers — utilized those high seed times to great advantage. Bocci outpaced his seed times to win the 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4 minutes, 31.81 seconds and the 100 butterfly in 48.94 seconds.
Bocci, who outpaced his seed time in the 500 free by eight seconds, was one of two individuals to win multiple titles. North Hills senior Josh Bogniard captured the 100 free and 100 back.
“We put in the work all year,” Bocci said. “Some years, you never know what's going to happen. We felt very confident. We knew coming in here that we had top seeds in some of the races and we knew we could come through because we put in the work.”
Seneca Valley's Daniel Simoes (200 IM, 1:50.86) and Butler's Ben Borvendeg (50 free, 20.95) also protected their top seeds to grab WPIAL crowns.
The Raiders' 400 free relay team of Kevin Donaldson, Gavin Blazer, Haihan Xu and Simoes also won as the top seed, finishing in 3:07.16 to edge out Butler's team of Borvendeg, Bocci, Gideon Goettler and Sam Deemer, who finished in 3:10.22.Upper St. Clair finished with 276.5 points to win the team title for the first time since 2011, edging out Seneca Valley, which finished with 275.Borvendeg said winning in the 50 free as a favorite was a new situation.“I'm not used to it because I've never been the top seed,” Borvendeg said. “We did the work we had to do in-season. We got the result we wanted.”Simoes, who also finished third in the 100 free and was a part of a third-place finish in the 200 free relay, wanted to set the pace with his win. Seneca Valley, which narrowly lost out on the team title to Upper St. Clair, needed all the points it could find.“We talked a lot about this when we scored the meet out and were planning on what we were going to do,” said Simoes on the Raiders' quest for a team title. “We wanted to be prepared for the meet. It's so different this year and we had to adapt and adjust to that.”Simoes felt the pressure to hold off Panthers' senior Josh Matheny, who finished less than a second behind Simoes.“I was trying not to think about it too much,” Simoes said. “It was a lot of pressure, I wanted to get the first for my team and give us a chance of winning. It was intimidating going against Josh because he is a good swimmer.”
