Swimmers from Healdsburg and Windsor high schools, neighboring campuses with a long shared history and intertwined roots, have been nipping at each other’s heels all season.
For one, they share the same pool at Healdsburg High—so they stagger their daily practices, schedule their meets around each other and rub shoulders in the locker room.
The boys and girls swim teams at both schools also ended up being each other’s toughest competition this season, within their five-school Redwood partition of the North Bay League (including Healdsburg, Windsor, Analy, Piner and Rancho Cotate high schools).
The boys, especially, stayed in lockstep throughout league play—and ended their seasons only having lost to each other.
Windsor swim coach Jeneanne Ericsson sees these tight quarters and finishes as highly motivating. “That’s how you get those personal records, when you have such great competition that really pushes you to give it your all,” she said.
In the first of two Windsor-Healdsburg meets in 2025, Windsor just barely won by a score of 82-81, which came down to a single arm’s length in the final stretch of the final relay.
And in the boys’ second meeting, the score was so close and contentious that it didn’t get decided for days. It hinged on a single screw-up: A Healdsburg teammate counting laps for senior swimmer Yeshua Lemus in his long-distance, 500-meter freestyle race accidentally signaled for Lemus to end 50 meters early, potentially canceling out any points he might have racked up in the race.
These lap-counting issues are not uncommon in high-school swimming. “It was kind of like a gut punch,” said Leo Kluse, another senior HHS swimmer who served as co-captain of the team this year. “Our coach was yelling at him to keep going, but he just didn’t hear.”
After plenty of back-and-forth between coaches for the two teams, as young athletes’ emotions ran high, Windsor coach Ericsson made the call: Lemus’ swim would count, pushing Healdsburg’s score up to a victorious 86-84. Which means league officials will have to print two pennant banners for the Redwood race this year.
“We ended up sharing first place,” said Healdsburg swim coach Dean Clark. “I thought that was a super magnanimous and really sportsmanlike thing for Windsor to do.”
‘Severely Outnumbered’
The girls team from Windsor, however, beat Healdsburg beyond a shadow of a call this season—the only team in the Redwood to do so. As a result, Windsor claimed the pennant as their own for the first time in years, according to their coach.
In the first Windsor-Healdsburg matchup of 2025, much like on the boys side, the Windsor girls won by a razor-slim margin of 85-81.
Healdsburg might have been able to mount a challenge at that second meet, were it not for a serious scheduling conflict at play: The state finals for the annual SkillsUSA vocational awards were held down in SoCal that very same day, on Thursday, April 10.
This competition has become a hot extracurricular activity for Healdsburg students. As many as 35 local kids competed this year—including Ela Boardman and Abby Wetzel, core members of the girls swim team, who both took home SkillsUSA medals.
“They’re going to be great human beings,” said Clark, the Hounds coach, of his swimmers. “They’ll contribute to society, and not just because of the swim team.”
Thanks in part to SkillsUSA, Windsor’s girls team was about twice the size of Healdsburg’s that Thursday. “We were severely outnumbered,” said HHS sophomore swimmer Roisin O’Herlihy after the meet.
Coach Clark added: “It’s so funny this year, just like that—a difference of a few points, a couple of races, somebody wasn’t here, somebody was sick. That’s just the way it goes.”
But the Lady Hounds got a final leg up over the Windsor Wildcats at the cold and cloudy North Bay League championship meet at Santa Rosa Junior College last weekend, where they placed fifth out of the 10 high schools in the league with swim teams. Windsor came in sixth.
Gold-Medal Greaves
No one walked away from North Bay League finals more triumphant than Healdsburg junior Layla Greaves—an explosive swimmer who trains year-round as part of the Santa Rosa Neptunes club team, coached for decades by her father Dan.
Greaves easily won both of her individual races, the 100-meter backstroke and the 200-meter individual medley (IM), at the Junior College pool last Saturday. And her speedy times of 58.86 and 2:09.58, respectively, make her a shoo-in for those races at the upcoming North Coast Section championships in the East Bay on May 9-10. Top finishers from that meet will then go to state.
Healdsburg’s star swimmer is now within “tenths of a second” of the 100-yard backstroke record her own mother set at HHS in the ’90s, according to coach Clark. “Layla has had a really good year,” he said. “She just keeps getting better and better and better.”
Greaves also discovered a new superpower this year: She traded the 100-meter butterfly race for the 200-meter IM, which includes 50 meters of each stroke (butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle).
“A lot of people stay away from the 200 IM because it’s so hard,” her coach said—giving anyone brave enough to tackle it an edge.
Greaves explained: “I wanted to branch out, since I’ve been doing the 100 butterfly since freshman year. And when I began swimming the 200 IM, it didn’t stress me out as much as doing the 100 fly. I just kind of did it and hoped for the best.”
Indeed—best in the North Bay. Greaves’ little brother Lucas, a freshman on the Hounds boys team, likewise made a splash at league finals last weekend, with two fifth-place finishes in the 500-yard freestyle and the 100-yard backstroke.
“He’s such a great swimmer,” said Kluse, senior co-captain of the HHS boys team. “And he’s still so young.”
In fact, little brothers were a big theme at the pool this year: Kluse and his brother Milo, along with boys co-captain Julian Johannsen Giuffre and his brother Sebastian, trained alongside each other, too. “It’s exciting,” Layla Greaves said. “It’s a very sibling-bonding thing.”
These enduring family legacies also bode well for Healdsburg’s 2026 swim season, which will otherwise be a tough year for turnover. And remember, we’ve got a pennant or two to win back from Windsor.
See additional sports news at healdsburgtribune.com.
