ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 Competitive swimmers spend hours training in the pool, but the next challenge facing a group of St. Petersburg youth swimmers is out in the open water.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re all counting on us, so our goal is to go out there and win and be our best,\u201d swimmer Sawyer Hansen said.<\/p>\n
Four swimmers from St. Pete are representing Team USA in the World Junior Open Water Swimming Championships in Argentina.<\/p>\n
\u201cI take it with pride, I never take it as a nervous energy. I use it as more excitement just knowing that this is something so many kids dream of and I get to live that,\u201d swimmer Brinkleigh Hansen said.<\/p>\n
What makes it even more special is three of the four of them are siblings. Karrington, Brinkleigh and Sawyer Hansen get to share this experience together.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh yeah, this is the greatest thing to be able to compete and swim with my sisters, My family is always competitive always want to be the best you can be and being able to represent Team USA at the highest level is the best it gets,\u201d Sawyer Hansen said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve grown up doing swimming together and all kinds of sports, but particularly swimming, swimming together in the same group same hour, like we see how hard each other are working, so I think that motivates each other, and now we get to represent with each other and go have fun,\u201d Brinkleigh\u00a0Hansen said.<\/p>\n
Karrington Hansen\u00a0is away at college as she is a swimmer at the University of Kentucky, so while the three high schoolers train in St. Pete, she is training in Lexington.<\/p>\n
The fourth member of the group is Ansley Bess, a freshman at St. Petersburg High School. She said when she heard the news that she would be swimming for Team USA, she couldn\u2019t believe it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kind of didn\u2019t process it because I initially found out right after my race from my friend\u2019s coach, and I just didn\u2019t believe it because I\u2019ve never performed on this stage before, so it was just really \u2018Wow,\u2019 to me, it was cool,\u201d Bess said.<\/p>\n
But Bess is in luck: her teammate, Brinkleigh Hansen, has performed on this stage before. She has already represented Team USA, so she\u2019s helping her teammates ease the nerves and enjoy the experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s honestly such an honor, and it\u2019s something that you never get used to. I started representing Team USA back in 2024 when I was a freshman at St. Pete High School and I\u2019ve done many international competitions since then. I\u2019d say my biggest one was one last year in Singapore and the feeling never goes away, it\u2019s so incredible and I\u2019m just glad that I can do it with my siblings and one of my teammates this time,\u201d Brinkleigh Hansen said.<\/p>\n
The competition runs from Sept. 3-6 in Sante Fe, Argentina. Sawyer said they don\u2019t have that many practice reps in open water, so they are embarking on a new challenge in a new country.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpen water is way different than in-pool swimming, in-pool swimming is like swim on your own, it\u2019s your own lane, but open water, there\u2019s so many people around you \u2014 it\u2019s aggressive fighting, kicking everything you can think of so you got to be mentally tough and fight through adversity,\u201d Sawyer\u00a0Hansen said.<\/p>\n
They will put all that training to the test in Argentina against the best young swimmers in the world and will try to bring home gold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 Competitive swimmers spend hours training in the pool, but the next challenge facing a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1747,1238,274,1748,1236,2200,70639,115,110,202,204,203,199,201,200,1553,135,278,2032,835],"class_list":["post-392713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-app-high-school-sports","tag-app-sports","tag-app-top-stories","tag-athlete-of-the-week","tag-florida-sports","tag-instagram-bn9","tag-michael-epps","tag-news","tag-sports","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-swimming","tag-tampa","tag-top-stories","tag-trending-topics","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}