Swimming And Women Basketball Begin For USVI Athletes At Lima 2019 Pan Games

Three athletes representing the U.S. Virgin Islands Olympic Committee began competition in several swimming events on Tuesday at the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima.

According to the committee, Adriel Sanes, 20, Matthew Mays, 20, and Natalia Kuipers, 17, competedin the Men’s 100 Breaststroke, and the Men’s and Women’s 200mButterfly, respectively.

For the morning events, Sanes swam 5th in the second heat of the Men’s100m breastroke with time of 1:03.03; Mays swam seventh with a time of2:07.41 in the second heat of the Men’s 200m Butterfly; and Kuipers finished seventh and clocked a time of 2:32.49 in the first heat of theWomen’s 200m Butterfly, followed up later in the evening placing seventhwith a time of 2:32:07 in the Final B for the same event.

All three athletes recently competed at the 18th FINA World Championships2019inGwangju,SouthKoreajusttwoweeksago. Both Sanes and Mays represented the territory last year at the 2018 Central American and Caribbean Games.

Women’s Basketball:

US Virgin Islands (ISV) Women’s Basketball team fell to Colombia 69-66 after holding a solid lead for most of their 2019 Pan American Games debut.

Both teams were pretty evenly matched at the end of game: both 25 percent at the 3-point line and ISV besting Colombia by just a few percentage points in the 2-pointers (42-37). Colombia however provedmore aggressive with rebounds with 51 compared to ISV’s 39.

Natalie Day, Imani Tate, and Anisha George were team ISV’s top scoringplayers with 23, 22 and 15 points respectively.

Tate said the challenge was definitely the height of the Colombian players and being more aggressive on defense.

“We have to box out and we have to put a body on them. We wereundersized the whole game, so we had to go up against 6’8” and 6’5”players. We just have to box out, play defense, and be consistent,” Tate said. “I think we struggled a little bit inside the post because the haveshooters too, so it seems we have to play the shooters honest or help inside the post, but for the most part we did what we could.