All American swimmers Sasha Karafin & Johnny Macko on their journey to Ivy League powerhouses

It's always been a dream of mine to be going to Yale and I'm so grateful that recruiting has made that possible. I feel like the process itself was really quick but and I want to say that I'm lucky but I know that we both work very hard for where we've gotten to. We both I think would say do eight to nine practices a week and we both train distance so it's definitely a lot of yardage but I feel like the support from the district and our coaches has been super awesome and it's super It's super easy to Do what we do because so many people are there for us, yeah. We work very hard in the pool, out of the pool, school and swimming, so it's just really nice being able to see the rewards of going to Ivy League schools and We have fun along the way. The difficulty of swimming, like every single day for almost every week of the year, along with a very academic schedule has, they like help each other. It's almost like a, you know, a direct relationship. When one goes up, the other goes up. So like, I feel like when I'm doing good in school, I do good in swim. And when I do good at swim, I do good in school. When we were like 12 years old, we would go to like meets in like Virginia and Maryland, we've always just been like on the pool deck together. We swim the same events, so we practice in the same like portion of the pool. Yeah, even in middle school, like we would always say hi to each other in the hallways. We used to go on field trips together for this club, so we've just always, always like known each other. And yeah, I feel like we're also ultra competitive sometimes, especially. With a lot of people at our school, like grades and swim, like I know that I broke two minutes first in the 200 free. He's a little faster now, but I feel like we always have kind of had that going on, yeah. So who got the best test grade in the past week out of the two of you? Who got the better grade on the U.S. History Regents is probably a better question because that was me. Okay, okay, I got a 99, so. I got a 100. Okay. So. What does it mean that the two of you kind of shared a really incredible trajectory on your lives? I don't know I feel like it just says a lot about like the swimming community as a whole like I feel like everyone on our team both at club and at varsity it's just a super supporting environment and I feel like you can feel that with everyone that you're around like everyone's just pushing you to be better and I feel like to be able to say that two people from our district have been able to kind of get to some of the best schools in the country and do it through our sport is just so lucky and I feel like it's definitely helpful to have people that are like high High achieving and want to be doing it around you all the time. Yeah, definitely. Like, the flexibility from school as well, it just allows us to not have to worry about, like, making stuff up. Even though we do everything, like, it just, like, removes some extra stress, so it helps us succeed everywhere. What about swimming helps you do better in school, and what about school helps you stay motivated? I feel like for me it's definitely time management, like I feel like the routine of kind of like going to morning practice, going straight to school, going back to practice, I feel like that definitely taught me a lot about like managing my time in school too and especially like in school like I feel like I could be more on top of what I'm doing and I feel like I definitely feel like I have focus on what I'm doing because I know that when I'm at practice I want to be all in at practice, I don't really want to be thinking about anything else. And I feel like I could say the same for school, like I kind of want to have my head in one place. Yeah, so with swimming, it's definitely very rigorous. We swim thousands upon thousands of yards every single day. So when you go into school and you have a test, you're like, okay, maybe this isn't as bad as swimming a 5,000 for time at practice. The Vice President of the United States of America. I think it's awesome. I mean, we work super hard and I'm just super proud of our team and our district in general and this is super huge for the two of us, yeah. Yeah, and I think it represents the district really well, showing that two swimmers from different schools, both going to Ivy League schools with All-American. I just think it really shows that what they're doing is working and that they can produce really talented people.