Blue Pony swimmers dive into the new season

Winter sports are going to be anything but normal. They even started later than normal. And after the Montana High School Association worked to provide set guidelines for the different sports, shaking the normal up a bit, one of the teams that is feeling it the most this season is the Havre High swim team.

The Blue Ponies will be back in the water, there is no question there, but there will be plenty of differences to the season. After pushing through a tough year in the 2019-2020 season, HHS will be excited to compete at the very least, even though COVID-19 has certainly changed some things up.

And Havre head coach Bill Kilgore has a lot of faith in both his veterans and newcomers to the team.

"I can tell you that we have strong leadership from our senior girls for sure and some newcomers with a little bit of experience," Kilgore said.

The boys team is composed of Brigham Blackwell, Chase Mariani, Conner McCay, Hiram Cammon, Joey Byrd, Simon Hart and Wyatt Hagstrom. The Pony girls squad will be made up of Aliviah Pratt, Allie Messinger, Amber Coleman, Amya Custer, Grace Crantz, Kate Hemmer, Kyla Burchard, Lemon Herdina, MacKenzie Dean, Megan Miller, Morgan Flammond, Naveah Phillips, Taliya Manuel, Blakelee Lines and Tori Messineo.

This season, the Ponies will have a lot of meets completed in their home pool, but not alongside opposing teams. However, the first meet of the year, this weekend's Havre Triangular, sees Hardin and Billings Central competing against Havre in the Havre Community Pool. Feb. 6, Havre has CMR, Great Falls and Hardin going up against one another in a virtual meet, while Feb. 19 is the usual yearly Great Falls and CMR meet with the Ponies headed to Great Falls, and the Class A State Swim Meet will be Mar. 5-6 at a to-be-determined time and location.

The schedule seems very short on paper, but Kilgore explained the purpose of virtual meets and how they impact the year.

"The toughest meet is a good question," Kilgore said. "I'm not sure what this season is going to look like because the majority of our meets look like they'll be virtual. We'll swim in our pool and the other team swims in theirs and we compare times. Both pools will have officials to validate times and rules."

The majority of the schedule is full of opponents that really pushed Havre's limits in recent years. CMR and Great Falls are tough AA schools with strong swim programs. Both schools competed with Havre at the beginning of the 2019-2020 season, with the schools from the Electric City taking the top two places. It will be another season with the Ponies taking on some rough waves, whether in-person or virtually.

As for Class A opponents, Billings Central and Hardin are two of the most prominent programs in the Eastern A. The Rams develop very tough and fast swimmers, while the Bulldogs are known for having a swim team that will stick with you to the very end, proving their endurance and effort as a program. With those two teams joining the fray once more, Havre is going to be battling against some powerful competition once again for the 2020-2021 season.

The teams that the Ponies face this season will be a challenge, but Kilgore knows that COVID-19 will always be lurking around the corner as the season progresses.

"The COVID-19 protocols are ever changing, but the most difficult challenge will be to overcome any quarantine we may face," Kilgore said. "Going 10-14 days out of the pool in the middle of the season is not an ideal situation to be sure, but we will do our best to adapt and overcome any of the challenges faced."

The Blue Ponies are scheduled to begin the 2021 swimming season with a meet against Billings Central and Hardin this Saturday in the Havre Community Pool.