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Butler, Hofrichter swim well at meet

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By DAREK SHARP

dsharp@tampatrib.com

Published: October 28, 2009

PLANT CITY - The drive to qualify for the state swim meet begins this week.

Local schools recently had a good warm-up meet in the form of the Western Conference championships, held Oct. 17 at the Bobby Hicks Pool in South Tampa. All 26 of Hillsborough County's public high schools had their teams on hand.

Durant's boys had the best team result for the Plant City area, coming in third in the Federal Division (out of nine teams) and seventh overall. The Plant City boys wound up fourth in the division and 10th overall.

On the girls' side, Durant edged into the top 10, tying new school Steinbrenner High. Erin Hofrichter won the 200-meter freestyle event in the Federal Division competition.

The Federal Division is made up of nine schools from eastern Hillsborough County.

Blair Butler, the Plant City High boys' standout, nearly pulled off a double victory. Butler won the 200-meter freestyle race in the Federal Division with a time of 1:51.47. Then in a dramatic 500 freestyle, the longest race, it was stroke for stroke with Butler getting edged out by Newsome High's Jacoby Bukaweski. Butler finished six-tenths of a second behind, with the duo's nearest competitor coming in 20 seconds later.

The two will face one another again on Friday in the Class 3A-4 meet. Based on the Western Conference results it looks like Plant City is in a tougher district than Durant. Along with Newsome, which was the Federal team champ and second only to Plant High on both the boys and girls side, Plant City will be going up against strong squads such as Bloomingdale and Wharton.

Newsome is the district host but the meet will be held at the New Tampa YMCA. Races start at 9:30 a.m. this Friday with the finals set to start at 5:30 p.m.

Plant City's Anthony Rodriguez and Gabe Haas both set personal bests at the conference swim, in the 100 breast and 100 butterfly respectively.

Durant is in District 2A-8, which contains surprise American Division team champ Hillsborough but overall is not filled with powerful squads. The 2A-8 meet is Saturday starting at 9 a.m. at Berkeley Prep.

Ed Bandi had a tremendous showing at the conference meet for Durant, winning the breaststroke and placing second in the 200 freestyle.

Strawberry Crest, which was led by Savannah Bradley and Mark Livernois at the conference meet, is in 1A-7, which will also stage its meet at Berkeley Prep but on Thursday.

The writer is employed part-time by radio station WDAE 620-AM.

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