David Weeks will be busy keeping tabs on the Carrollton Bluefins this weekend.

While the Bluefin coach watches four of his team’s oldest and most advanced swimmers at the USA Senior State Championships at the University of Georgia, 53 other Bluefin swimmers will be competing at the Georgia Parks and Recreation State Meet a couple hours away in Augusta.

With Weeks in Athens, assistant coach John Pepper will patrol the deck for the Bluefins at the two-day GRPA State Meet, which begins at 9 this morning at the Augusta Aquatics Center.

Swimmers ages 10-and-under will swim today, while those 11-and-older hit the water Saturday.

“I’m looking for fast times, a lot of best times,” Pepper said. “I’m looking at, for the older kids, having three to five make finals Saturday night.”

Pepper said Carolyn Ives, Josh Grover, Kelly Fazio, Jacob Smith and Evan Harte all have a good chance at making the finals and competing for a state title Saturday. The Bluefins came away from Augusta with five state titles last year.

More than 800 swimmers will be in Augusta for the GRPA State Meet. To qualify, swimmers had to post a top-three finish in at least one individual or medley event during district championships two weeks ago.

Preliminaries get underway at 9 a.m. both days with the top eight from each event advancing to the finals and earning a medal. Pepper said he expects the 9-10 and 11-12 age groups to be the most competitive.

“Normally, I’d say it’d be the 18 year olds, but this weekend falls on the Senior State (Championships) in Athens, so a lot of the real heavy swimmers will be up there,” Pepper said.

Connor Pierce, Kent Lawrence, Katie Harte and Tanner Pearson will represent the Bluefins at the Senior State Championships, which uses a 50-meter long course pool. GRPA events are held in a 25-meter pool.

Unlike GRPA, there are no categorized age groups at the Senior State Championships, which started Thursday and runs through Saturday. As long as swimmers are at least 14 and achieve the necessary qualifying times, they’re eligible for the championships.

Three of the Bluefin swimmers in Athens are high-school aged, while Lawrence, 19, will be a sophomore at college in the fall.

“This is a higher level meet in that these kids are trying to qualify for national level teams,” Weeks said. “After the GRPA state, that’s the end of the recreation season.

Here, these kids are trying to advance on to championships and senior nationals.”

Weeks said he expects many of his younger swimmers to do well today in Augusta.

He’s hoping at least five different individual swimmers will reach the finals and would like to see 10 relay teams advance past the preliminaries.

“To get 10 of them in would be really good considering our ‘A’ relay team in 8-and-under boys never made it past district,” Weeks said. “They got disqualified. They had the times to make finals had they stayed on the blocks.”

The finals at the GRPA State Meet are scheduled to wrap up each day around 8 p.m.

When the meets are over in Augusta and Athens, Pepper and Weeks hope the Bluefins will have plenty of hardware to bring back west with them from both competitions.