Swimming on the 1st day of the 2018 Eastern Interscholastic Swimming and Diving Championship, an 83-year old meet for prep schools in the Northeastern U.S., Penn Charter senior Reece Whitley swam a 1:43.55 in the 200 yard IM. That breaks the National Independent High School Record in the event by almost a second-and-a-half.
The old record of 1:44.90 was swum by Curtis Ogren of Saint Francis High School in Mountain View, California in 2014.
Whitley had faster splits on each of the first 3 legs of the race, and gave up ground on the freestyle, but had more-than-enough room to go.
Split Comparisons:
| Curtis Ogren | Reece Whitley | |
| Old Record | New Record | |
| Fly | 23.20 | 22.67 |
| Back | 25.79 | 25.34 |
| Breast | 29.95 | 29.38 |
| Free | 25.96 | 26.16 |
| Total | 1:44.90 | 1:43.55 |
David Nolan still holds the public and overall high school records with his 1:41.39 from 2011.
Easterns is one of the few meets that, rather than splitting by days between prelims and finals, swims the first half of the meet on Friday and the second half on Saturday. That means that Whitley still has the 100 breaststroke to swim on Saturday. He already owns the National independent and overall high school records in the 100 breast with a 51.84 from this meet last season.
Whitley is heading to Cal next season. He didn’t swim on Penn Charter’s 200 medley relay, but did split a 21.04 leadoff on Penn Charter’s 200 free relay.
Race Video:
Was that filmed with a toaster?
David Curtiss
This guy goes 1:43 in the 200 IM in High School but can’t break 21 in the 50? Goodness. That’s a large discrepancy.
From what we’ve seen of Reece the longer the race the better….guessing it takes him a little while to get up to speed
He died a little at the end, but 25.3 is a fast back split (Dressel went 25.01)
If Renoir were alive his videos would look like this.
I didn’t know it was possible to take a video this bad.
Lol these comments are more about the video quality than the race
Get somethin on David Curtiss boi just turned 15 and already broke 20
he no MA tho
Who cares if he isn’t Micharl Andrew, the best age group swimmer of all time? He’s still fast.