impressive performance

I just witnessed one of the most amazing, if not the most, performances by a high school athlete I've seen in my relatively short time covering sports professionally... and it was at a swim meet.
Pomperaug swimmer Travis McNamara set not only a Class L meet record, but a pool record in the 500 freestyle with a 4:29.74. Now if that time doesn't mean anything to you, consider this. The event was held at a college pool, which frequently hosts conference and New England championships.
The previous record at the Freeman Center (Wesleyan), which has been open for approximately a decade I believe, was nearly a full second slower than McNamara's mark. The Wesleyan team record was almost six seconds behind.
"You enjoy seeing such high level swimming," Farmington coach Scott Ferrigno said of the meet as a whole.
No kidding. Watching McNamara swim, with the seven next best swimmers in Class L trying to catch him, was like watching rowboats try to catch up to a motor boat. From the start of the race he was so smooth cutting through the water, and after one lap had already distanced himself by nearly a body length.
After 12 laps I turned to former Southington Athletic Director and CIAC member Bob Lehr and commented on how I was looking at the pool records on the wall to see how close McNamara might come. I speculated he might be within ten or 15 seconds.
As he raced through the final lap, everybody in the building was watching the clock. Now, as a member of the media, I am not supposed to cheer during events. But when he touched the wall I couldn't help but stand up and clap for him.
"With the level of swimming we have in Connecticut, it’s great," Ferrigno said. "Because, I know they have New England and college swim meets here, so it shows how strong Connecticut swimming is."
Truly impressive.

conference bragging rights

There is always a lot of debate between sports writers and fans in this state over what conferences are better or worse than others. It seems that everybody thinks the teams he watches are either the best, or not nearly as bad as others think they are in comparison to the rest of the state. But very rarely does anybody do any actual fact-based work on the subject.
Now, let me preface this by saying the following system is not perfect. Secondly, let me say that I went into this little project entirely unsure what the results would be (suffice it to say they surprised me a bit). But I have ventured to do some actual comparison of strength of conference based on the small sample of games in the girls state tournaments.
Here is my formula. I calculated win percentages for every team, and conference, in the state during the tournament against teams not from the same conference. If two conference opponents played each other, it counted neither as a win, nor as a loss.
Secondly, I discounted games against the CSC (the tech school league), which is notoriously outmatched in these tournaments. The CSC went 1-12 as a conference, and is clearly the weakest conference in the state. The lone win was by Capital Prep, and I will say they should be very proud of that.
After that, ties were broken based on the combined number of byes and wins over tech schools for the conference. It is hard to hold it against a school for getting that matchup when they might have been able to beat a better team had they played them. Same goes for teams that earned byes. At least these teams advanced to a later round.
I did not count the four Class LL playdown games in the system, but noted which teams and conferences were victorious in them. So here are the results based on conference winning percentage.

League .......# of tms. ...record...win%...byes..wins over CSC
NCCC..................11........13-6.......684....2....1
Southwest.............9.........8-6.......571....2....0....2 playdown wins
CCC(all divisions)..14.......15-12.......556....2....1
ECC(all divisions)..13.......13-12.......520....2....2
SCC.....................14.........9-9.......500....0....0....2 playdown wins
Shoreline.............8.........4-6.......400....2....3
Northwest.............6.........4-6.......400....2....2
FCIAC.................12.........6-9.......400....0....0
Berkshire.............7.........4-7.......364....2....3
NVL.....................7.........3-6.......333....0....0
CSC.....................12........1-12.......077....1....N/A

So interestingly, the North Central Connecticut Conference, featuring Class M champ Avon and Class S runner-up Coventry, had the best winning percentage by a significant margin. This may be coincidental because of the large number of NCCC teams that played each other, but it is hard to say. The FCIAC also played itself a large number of times, but finished below .500. (Including those head to head games the NCCC was 17-10, a .630 percentage and still in first.)
Now this is not to say that NCCC teams would beat CCC, FCIAC or SCC teams head to head. Obviously school size effects a lot. It just says how conferences did when competing against other schools their own size.
This also doesn't account for different divisions within certain conference such as the CCC or ECC. (I'm not sure which conferences has different divisions or how individual conference schedules work.)
The four champs were all from different conferences (SCC, Southwest, NCCC, CCC). So there was no clear edge there.
Of course this settles nothing completely, and is just a representation of one two-week period. If the tournaments were played again starting Monday there would obviously be completely different results. But it is fun and interesting to look at.