Longport Beach Patrol edges out Cape May, Brigantine for 2021 title
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – The Ocean City Beach Patrol Women’s Invitational is designed to test a range of lifeguarding skills – swimming, paddle boarding, rowing, racing into the surf and team events to show how they work together to protect swimmers at the Jersey shore.
The women from the Longport Beach Patrol won the 2021 team title with 14 points Thursday evening, July 22, at the 34th Street beach, just edging out the Cape May Beach Patrol by a point. In turn, the CMBP was a point ahead of third-place Brigantine.
Longport also won the first women’s race of the season at its home beach, the Longport Women’s Lifeguard Invitational.
“It’s definitely a great feeling just going against all these great athletes,” Taylor Phy said of her Longport team’s win. “It’s awesome to just compete against everyone who is out here. To come in first is an accomplishment for sure. All these girls are so awesome. They train all the time.”
Phy added she loves the Ocean City race. “It’s different than all the other races. It definitely tests all the abilities, all of lifesaving, what we do every day.”
Sisters Claudia and Olivia Scherbin won the opening event, the row-swim, for the Margate City Beach Patrol. Claudia, a graduate of Ocean City High School, swam and rowed crew for OCHS. Her sister, a rising senior, swims for OCHS and this event tested her skills with the oars as the two-person teams rowed out to a flag and then one rower jumped into the water and swam back to shore.
“It was a lot of fun,” Olivia said. “I’m not really a rower, but I just got in there and rowed as hard as I could and dove in and swam as fast as I could. Doing it with my sister was really fun too.”
Her older sister is the one who now rows for Clemson University.
For Olivia, rowing “wasn’t my cup of tea, but I would do it again in this event. It was a very short row so it didn’t bother me that much,” she laughed.
“It was super exiting and great to start the night off on this foot,” Claudia said, “and I loved doing it with my sister and doing it next to the Auble sisters is really awesome too.” (The Auble twins, Amanda and Kristine, are veteran rowers for Margate City.)
Claudia added it was fun for her to to be in a boat with her sister. “It was kind of out of her comfort zone, but I’m glad. She killed it in the swim. She helped us win. She was the reason we won.”
Asked if Olivia gave the team a good push-off in the boat to start the race, Claudia laughed. “Good enough for her. She did great.”
Brigantine’s Emma Schreiner and Fauve Haney were second and Cape May’s Becca Luft and Kate Donohue were third.
Cape May’s Kennedy Campbell won the next event, the paddle board, taking the lead early and never relinquishing it as paddlers had to race into the surf with their boards and navigate an M-shaped course. She was able to stay ahead of Wildwood’s Bella Taylor and Brigantine’s Grace Emig, who finished second and third, respectively.
Campbell said she tried to “stay on the inside of the chop, try to go right more than left and don’t let the wind pull me over and to let the chop smack me over.” She also wanted to get out fast and stay in the lead. She got over a wave early and that helped propel her forward.
“Honestly, something my former chief told me is to make them play your game. Make them play catch-up to you because it’s kind of your game if you’re in first,” Campbell said.
Longport’s Megan Fox won the box swim in relatively flat ocean conditions. Wildwood Crest’s Adrienne Bilello was second and North Wildwood’s Molly Kowal was third.
“There weren’t any big waves so it made for a good swim,” she said. “It was more about just getting out there and swimming fast because it was pretty clear. I could see the whole time.” Fox is a rising senior at Atlantic City High School. She is looking forward to her senior season at ACHS. “I think it will be really fun and exciting,” Fox said, “especially since we didn’t have things like the (Cape-Atlantic League meet) last year so it will be really cool to get back to those events.”
Fox, Phy and Longport teammates Kira McCully and Katie McClintock, a 2021 Mainland Regional High School graduate, won the medley relay event that included swimming, paddling, rowing and running.
In the final event of the evening, the surf dash relay, Wildwood Crest’s team beat Ocean City’s team by a split second.
The Wildwood Crest Beach Patrol team featured Christina Adams, Emie Frederick, Sofia Jurusz and Abigail Thompson.
When asked about their strategy, they all chimed in at once: “We tried to porpoise less because we knew it was pretty shallow. To get in there and get out as fast as possible. We’ve always been the underdog. We didn’t even have a lane. (Before they started the race, they had to move the crowd back to give the team a lane and a pole from which to start and finish.) We don’t even need a lane. We made our own lane.”
Asked how it felt to win, they all spoke at once again: “It feels incredible. It feels amazing. It’s awesome. I love my team.”
Ocean City’s team had Kat Soanes, Ryann Styer, Morgan Decosta and Emily DiMarino, who won the event at the Longport Invitational.
“It was a pretty fast sprint out there because you could just walk through the water,” Soanes said, “but there were a lot of holes so that was really difficult. It was fast.”
There are two more women’s races this season, the Cape May Point Beach Patrol Women’s Lifeguard Challenge at 6:30 p.m. tonight (July 28), a mini-triathlon with running, paddling and swimming at St. Pete’s Beach; and the Bill Howarth Women’s Lifeguard Invitational at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 11 at the Suffolk Avenue Beach in Ventnor.
Ocean City Beach Patrol
Women’s Invitational
Team: 1. Longport, 14 points; 2. Cape May, 13 points; 3. Brigantine, 12 points.
Row-swim: 1. Margate (Claudia Scherbin, Olivia Scherbin); 2. Brigantine (Emma Schreiner, Fauve Haney); 3. Cape May (Becca Luft, Kate Donohue).
Paddleboard: 1. Kennedy Campbell, Cape May; 2. Bella Taylor, Wildwood; 3. Grace Emig, Brigantine.
Swim: 1. Megan Fox, Longport; 2. Adrienne Bilello, Wildwood Crest; 3. Molly Kowal, North Wildwood.
Medley relay: 1. Longport (Katie McClintock, Megan Fox, Kira McCully, Taylor Phy); 2. Brigantine (Kara Graybill, Grace Emig, Natalie Stinson, Abby Gragg); 3. Margate (Olivia Scherbin, Alexis Smallwood, Amanda Auble, Kristine Auble).
Surf dash: 1. Wildwood Crest (Abigail Thompson, Emie Frederick, Christina Adams, Sofia Jurusz); 2. Ocean City (Morgan Decosta, Emily DiMarino, Ryann Styer, Kat Soanes); 3. North Wildwood (Julie Blackmon, Danielle Shead, Emily Nelson, Lauren Young).
