Carlisle's Maddy Coombs 'pushes through to the finish,' strikes seventh place in PIAA 3A 500 free

LEWISBURG — Carlisle’s Maddy Coombs has a love-hate relationship with the 500-yard freestyle.

There are the moments where Coombs dismisses the attrition that comes with the long race and focuses on having fun. Other times, the feeling of hitting the final wall couldn’t come soon enough.

The love-hate balance helped her persevere in Saturday’s PIAA Class 3A 500 free event. After dropping a seventh-place time in the preliminary session, Coombs held her ground in the afternoon finals, securing a seventh-place medal, and a time of five minutes, 2.42 seconds, at Bucknell University’s Kinney Natatorium.

“I just think about the finish and being done with the race,” Coombs said, “and it kind of gets me through.”

The extra motivation to finish Saturday’s event was in part to swimming a total 1,000 yards in a seven-hour span, having clocked 4:59.78 in the prelims. Coombs also nursed some shoulder soreness across both races.

Despite the circumstances, the seventh-place honor was her first career PIAA medal — Coombs has competed in six different states in her lifetime. The seventh-place laurel joins Mid-Penn and District 3 gold in her 2023 medal collection.

“I think I did great regardless of my shoulder,” Coombs said. “I just pushed through to the finish.”

“It was awesome,” she added, clutching the medal dangling around her neck. “I’m really excited about it.”

Throughout the finals swim, Coombs drew from strategies that she credited in helping drive her postseason success. One of those was keeping an eye on her competitors as she sliced through water, a mechanism to recognize when to cut it loose or if she could maintain her current pace.

The other layer of foundation was her preparation leading up to Bucknell.

“I think I’ve trained really hard, and I think all my teammates pushed me, especially (senior) Elizabeth Gobin,” Coombs said. “She practiced with me while I was practicing for states even though she didn’t qualify. I think that was really great of her and that she could be there with me.”

With a seventh-place medal on the resume, Coombs has no plan of slowing down. She sets back into the blocks within the week for a club meet and begins her preparation for next season.

“I think I’m just going to go into next season with a really positive mindset,” she said.