HOOD RIVER — The Hood River Valley boys were ninth and the girls 10th at the 2026 OSAA Class 5A state swimming championships Feb. 20-21 in Beaverton.
The Eagles competed in the championships at Tualatin Hills Swin Club, where the Bend girls and Thurston boys won the team titles.
The HRV girls scored 11 points at state, where preliminaries were held Feb.20 — when the top six finishers in each of the 14 events advanced to the final. Sophomore Luca Montague was eighth in the 100-yard breaststroke in 1 minute, 10.89 seconds — about a second faster than she swam the event at district. Teammate Grace Roulette, a freshman, was 11th in 1:16.0.
The Eagle 200 freestyle relay placed ninth in 1:50.54. The team included Montague, Delaney Hackett, Roulette, and Ava Giordano. Sophie Helleberg also improved her seed time with her swim in the 100-yard freestyle. She was eighth in the preliminaries in 58.45. Montague was 10th in the 200-yard freestyle prelim in 2:11.13.
The top finish for the Eagles came from their 200-yard medley relay team of Helleberg, Montague, Ohnyxa Heredia Merida, and Giordano. They were seventh in 2:00.06, just missing out on a spot in the final.
The HRV boys scored eight team points and were led by the third-place finish of senior Felipe Mendez in the 100-yard breaststroke (1:00.44). Mendez, whose district meet seed time was 1:01.97, lowered that with his 1:00.75 clocking in the Feb. 20 prelims. In the final he closed on runner-up Marker Still but couldn’t quite catch the Bend swimmer.
Sophomore Kane Wagner was fifth in the 100-yard freestyle. Wagner qualified fifth with his preliminary time of 50.20. He went 49.36 in the Feb. 21 final. Teammate Liam McGeeney was seventh in the 100-yard butterfly in 55.28 (prelims). That race came shortly after he had finished seventh in the 50-yard freestyle in a personal best 22.85 seconds. Teammate Kane Wagner was 11th in the prelims in 23.22.
Quinn Henderson, Mendez, McGeeney and Wagner combined to swim to sixth place in the 200-yard medley relay in 1:41.68. That same group also qualified for the 400-yard freestyle relay final, but they were disqualified (after swimming to the fifth-fastest preliminary time of 3:24.79 — a one-second improvement over district).
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