Despite it being Friday the 13th, the Dane swimming and diving team had a fun and competitive meet with a very good Salida team Friday.

The Danes had some very nice swims, but the Salida girls were just a fraction better on this particular day. FVS needed to win and place third in the last 400 free relay to pull out the win, but they were not quite able to get the third place. Co-Captain Alanna Erickson swam an amazing anchor leg, making up about six yards and winning the relay with a blazing 55-second swim. Another great swim was sophomore Hannah Pratt's effort in the 100-yard butterfly. Her swim of 1:22 (converted from meters) earned a key second place. Pratt embodies the type of team spirit the coaches want kids to have in the way that she embraced this challenge, faced up to her nerves and delivered her best swim of the season when her team needed it.

Senior co-captain Morgan McCurdy got in some good work with fine swims in the 200 and 500 free for two tough second-place finishes against Brooke Love and Kaiti Davis, two of the best distance swimmers in the league. Hannah Carrese barely missed qualifying for states in the 50 free but did swim her best time of the season in the 50. She was followed in second place by sophomore Ingrid Idland, who is really improving quickly and will swim her way onto some of the top relay slots if she continues to work hard in practice.

The Danes swim one of their biggest rivals, the Manitou Mustangs, Wednesday at 4 p.m. at the FVS pool. This meet will be a real battle right down to the last relay, and the entire team will need to swim every race of every event to their collective best to beat one of the better teams in the league. The meet will also be available live on ihigh.com/fountainvalley, so tune in to watch!