LINCOLN – The girls from the combined BNFF swim squad placed 14th at the 2025 NSAA Swimming and Diving State Championships, held over the weekend at Nebraska’s Devaney Center. 

Anchored by a pair of top ten finishes from Fairbury’s Avery Baumann, the girls from BNFF (Beatrice, Norris, Fairbury and Freeman) recorded a total of 42 team points over the course of Saturday’s 12 championship events. Only 23 girls teams recorded team points in the finals and many more competed but did not score. 29 boys teams recorded at least one team point; the BNFF boys did not qualify for the final table, but came very close to doing so in multiple events. 

Let’s dive into the results from this year’s state swimming and diving championships, which wrapped up this past weekend at Nebraska’s Devaney Natatorium. The state diving competitions were held all day Thursday, with swimming preliminaries on Friday ahead of the championship events all day Saturday.  

Southeast Nebraska was represented in Lincoln by the BNFF squad, a combined team consisting of athletes from four area schools, Beatrice, Norris, Fairbury and Freeman. They all practice together in Beatrice, and competed for the final time this season over the weekend in Lincoln.  

Up first on Thursday was the state diving championships. Representing BNFF was Carter Mertz – he was the third diver up Thursday, which technically meant he came into the event with the third lowest score among qualifiers, and he ended up placing 19th with a score of 209.85, which was just outside the top 16 score needed for medal consideration, but that meant he placed better than six other contestants, which is no small improvement.  

Colin Farr of Lincoln High won the event with a score of 432.20, 25 points higher than the second-place diver. No BNFF girls qualified for the diving event. 

In the swimming competition, after preliminaries on Friday, Saturday marked the start of all the championships. The BNFF quartet of Jaedyn and Addisyn Baxa plus Isabella Scheele and Avery Baumann placed 13th in the girls 200 medley relay to start off the day with a time of 1:55.71, just off their prelim time of 1:55.49 which seeded them 12th in the finals.  

Then Fairbury’s star senior Avery Baumann took center stage in the middle part of the day. She placed 8th in the girls 50-yard freestyle with a time of 24.63, and then placed 6th in the 100 free (53.23) to earn her team a total of 24 ranking points in those two events alone. Baumann will continue her swimming career at the University of Idaho next year. 

The girls (Jaedyn Baxa, Scheele, Tabitha Crawford and Baumann) then placed 12th in the 200 free relay (1:43.28), beating their prelim time by more than a second, while the boys (Reid Novotny, James Given, Noah Jacobsen and Sean Carrera) placed 18th in the preliminaries (1:33.78) just missing out a spot in the finals by a few hundredths of a second. 

And finally, the boys (Sean Carrera, Given, Dru Breeden and Novotny) just missed out on a spot in the finals of the 400 free relay, finishing one spot (17th – 3:25.95) out of the final event of the day.  

In total, the BNFF girls finished in 14th with a total of 42 points, a pretty strong showing at this year’s swimming and diving state championship. Marian won the team event with 330 points on the girls side, and Lincoln East prevailed on the boys side with 334.  

To see the full results from the preliminaries and the final events in both this year's swimming and diving state championships, check out the NSAA website.