Aggie Swim & Dive coach Jay Holmes reflects on SEC Championships

During Tuesday's edition of TexAgs Radio, Aggie men's swimming & diving coach Jay Holmes joined in-studio to look back on the Maroon & White's performance at the SEC Championships and goals for the team at the upcoming national meet.

Key notes from Jay Holmes interview

• We really didn't have a lot of COVID protocols in Knoxville last weekend. We had a true swimming warmup, and that's like 400 people in the pool at once. During COVID, we couldn't do that. For our team, it was great to have them experience a normal meet. It's pretty chaotic during warmups, but it was still great to do it.
   
• You have to trust your athletes a lot and prepare them really well because it is mass chaos out there. Part of the process is getting your athletes used to doing it, and most of them grew up doing it.
   
• We went in as probably the seventh-ranked team in the SEC. Last year, we had the NCAA swimmer of the year, and he's no longer on a team. We knew people were writing us off. We went in with a chip on our shoulder. We finished fifth, and we know we have more in the tank. Fifth is a good performance, but we know we're a lot better.
   
• For Ethan Gogulski, we recruited him, and we knew he came from an Aggie family. It was cool for us to recruit Ethan. He wasn't highly recruited, but he was our first verbal commit in that class. He got diagnosed right before his first SEC Championship with testicular cancer. He waited two weeks for surgery so he could go to SECs. He had a really good freshman year, and after that first surgery, it came back. The second surgery took all of the lymph nodes out of the core of his body. For us to see him at the SEC Championships this year and get second in both the 100 back and the 200 back, was impressive. We really thought he was going to win the 200 back.
   
• The last chance meet is a fun meet for us. We take our whole team to it. It's much more relaxed. We get great performances from our guys, and we hope to have some great performances to get more guys to NCAAs.