One family fills all spots in California team’s freestyle relay

There are family legacies within high school programs, and then there are the Forbes brothers of the La Verne (Calif.) Damien High swimming program. Not only are all four male children in the Forbes family swimmers for Damien, they're all swimmers there at the same time and for the first time, on Tuesday, they even combined to form a single relay squad.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Damien 400-meter freestyle relay squad during the team's Tuesday meet against Covina (Calif.) Charter Oak School was an all Forbes affair. The four members of the squad were freshman Emmanuel Forbes, sophomore Michael Forbes Jr., junior Gabriel Forbes and senior Raphael Forbes.

For once, the relay allowed the teenagers' father to root for all four of his sons, with none of them facing off against each other in the same event for a change; all four compete in freestyle events, so it's not unusual for multiple Forbes brothers to compete in the same freestyle race.

"Everybody on that team, I'm rooting for," Michael Forbes Sr. told the Times.

Will the all-Forbes relay emerge again later in the season? That remains to be seen.

Regardless, for at least one evening the entire male section of the family got to swim toward the same goal, perhaps even with younger sisters Rachel Forbes (an eighth-grader) and Ariel Forbes (a seventh-grader) in attendance.

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