Dan Friedell / Special to The Citizen

AUBURN - Auburn High girls swimming coach Tom Clary likes to think he keeps his composure on the pool deck, but when his 200-yard medley relay team was leading the final heat at the Section III championship meet on Nov. 5, he was on his toes.

“Tom said he didn't jump when we finished, but he so did,” said Laura Iwanicki, the sophomore breaststroker who swims the second leg of the relay for the Maroons. “He's embarrassed to admit it.”

As Iwanicki finished her sentence, the other swimmers in the sectional-winning relay #) backstroker Kiersten Salemi, butterflyer Candice Elliott, and freestyler Sarah Blair #) all started laughing and backing up their teammate's assertion.

The group clearly gets along well, evident by the way they joked with each other while being interviewed. And that familiarity should help them handle the pressure of swimming in the high school state championship meet this weekend at Erie Community College in Buffalo.

The swimmers are hoping they can put in an effort that will make Clary leave his feet once again. He said a finish inside the state's top-10 might do that.

While Clary's vertical leap is not visible on the Maroons' tape of the sectional meet, anecdotal evidence is in abundance.

And, it's just one of the swimmers' many anecdotes.

They remembered competing at last spring's YMCA national championships in Florida when a food fight - with goldfish crackers as ammunition - broke out just before bedtime.

“We were eating goldfish all weekend from a big container,” Salemi said. “And the last night we threw them all over the floor.”

Elliott picked up the story.

“And our coach (Jim Clary, Tom's brother) heard us, and came in, and was like ‘Why are there goldfish all over the floor?'” Elliott said. “And we said, ‘Laura did it.' But she was in the other room sleeping.”

“It was a lot of fun,” Salemi said after the laughing subsided.

The laughter might also help Blair, a two-time sectional champion and the only Maroon to qualify for the 2004 state meet, relax and make a run at the school record (24.50 seconds) in the 50-yard freestyle. That would require slicing three-tenths of a second off of her best time of the year, which came in the final heat of the sectional meet at Nottingham.

When the relay team qualified for states, Blair was thrilled to know she would have some company.

“Last year I didn't know anyone and everyone else went out (to eat) with their teams,” Blair said. “I didn't have a team to go with.”

Blair, who often seems uncomfortable with the attention her success in the pool brings, should benefit from having some teammates with whom to blend in. She entered the 2004 state meet seeded 32nd and ended up 14th. This year, Tom Clary is hopeful Blair can swim into the meet's final heat, guaranteeing a top-eight finish.

“She's quietly determined,” Clary said after Tuesday's practice, which focused on refining the swimmers' relay exchanges. “She has a tremendous amount of drive. If she can get to the same adrenaline level she had at sectionals, she can go even faster.”

But she knows that she'll have to take on that responsibility instead of relying on the raucous sectional meet crowd for motivation.

“It's not the same as sectionals,” Blair said. “Not everyone you know is there, and you have to pump yourself up.”