Last weekend’s Southwest Ohio Swimming and Diving Classic was a good measuring stick for the Lakota East teams.

The boys finished 19th out of 41 teams and the girls 30th out of 39 at the 30th annual event, which included preliminary swimming and diving competition at nine different sites with swimming finals Saturday and Sunday nights at Keating Natatorium on the St. Xavier High School campus, sandwiched around diving finals at the Keating Aquatics Center at the University of Cincinnati.

Junior Abby McConnell finished fourth in 1-meter diving, logging a finals score of 434.30, while senior Emily Roth finished sixth in the 50-yard butterfly. Sophomore Matthew McDonald set the pace for Lakota East in swimming, finishing among the top eight in four events, including second in the 200 backstroke with a time of 1:55.38.

“If you look at both squads, I think we got a great performance from Matt and a great performance in diving from Abby,” coach Dennis Beck said Wednesday morning. “I think we saw what we needed to see, especially with the relays. We’ll take a look at tweaking some things to get a couple of the teams to district and state.”

Beck was especially impressed with seeing McDonald surpass his qualifying time in the 200 backstroke finals. He also finished sixth in the 400 individual medley and 100 backstroke and seventh in the 200 IM.

“Matt continues to just keep developing and getting a little faster,” the coach said.

The Thunderhawks are scheduled to swim in tri-meets Friday at Mason and Tuesday at Sycamore before competing in the Greater Miami Conference championship meet on Feb. 2 at Mason. Lakota East is scheduled to open Division I sectional competition with boys diving on Feb. 5 and girls diving on Feb. 6, both at Miami, followed by boys swimming on February 8 and girls swimming on Feb. 9, both at Keating Natatorium