Diving phenom Kendall Swett and super-freshmen Megan Kono and Maureen O'Neill led the women's swimming and diving team to a fifth-place finish in the 11-team field this weekend at the NESCAC Championships held at Wesleyan.
The Jumbos tallied a total of 814 points. For the eighth consecutive year, Williams (1853) came out way in front of the field with Middlebury (1481.5), Amherst (1428.5) and Conn. College (831) following to round out the top five.
With the cream of the league crop well established heading into the meet, several teams were gunning for the four-five-six spots. As coach Nancy Bigelow had predicted, the battle for fourth place was a tight one, with Conn. College, Tufts and sixth-place finisher Wesleyan (765) all within 40 points of each other.
While Bigelow could not pinpoint just one or two swimmers who made the finish possible - "there were so many people that had either their
lifetime-best time or college-best time or senior-best time; I would be naming everybody," she said - several people inscribed themselves into the record books.
Swett outdid herself yet again in what has become her signature meet over the past two years. The senior won both the 1-meter and 3-meter dives and shattered a handful of records, all of them hers, from the 2007 NESCAC Championships.
In the 1-meter dive, her first-place finish of 473.45 broke the record for Wesleyan Pool. However, it was in the 3-meter dive where her score of 536.85 broke the school, pool, NESCAC and meet records - all records that she had set a year ago.
Her combined score from the preliminaries and the semifinals (528.5) was far ahead of that of any other diver at that point, which alleviated some of the pressure going into the final stage.
"That was the best set of dives I've done all year," Swett said. "Right after the semifinals, I knew the combined score was my best score yet, so I came back into the finals really relaxed."
Sophomore Lindsay Gardel also had a good showing in both diving events. She finished fourth in the 1-meter dive (427.4) and fifth in the 3-meter dive (404.4).
In the swimming events, Kono and O'Neill had career days for the Jumbos. Kono scored national B-cut qualifying times in the 1,650 free, the 500 free and the 200 free. She also finished second in the 1650 free at 17:31.65, breaking the Tufts record of 17:46.59 set by Maureen Monahan (LA '91) in 1988. After just missing the national B-cut time in the preliminaries of the 500 free, she finished fourth in the finals in 5:05.20 to hit the mark.
Kono's 74 total points were the most points accrued by any Tufts swimmer at the meet and tied for 19th overall with Williams senior Jenna Barbary.
O'Neill, a sprinter who has made an immediate impact this year in the team's short-distance performances, improved upon her own school record in the preliminaries of the 50-yard freestyle. Her time of 24.29 took a quarter of a second off her previous record of 24.53, set on Nov. 28 in a dual meet against Wellesley. She finished third overall with a time of 24.41, which also made the national B cut.
While O'Neill held down the sprinting events, the distance swimmers were on their A-game all weekend. Sophomore Meredith Cronin broke a school record in the 1,000-yard freestyle with a time of 10:42.73, also set by Monahan in 1987. Her time of 10:41.55 was good enough for fifth place overall in the event.
Disqualifications in the 200 freestyle and 200 medley relays could have made the difference between fifth and fourth place for the squad. Wesleyan Pool uses an electronic touch pad, rather than an official, to determine early starts, something that seems to have thrown the Jumbos off. The foursome of O'Neill, Kono, Cronin and senior Renee Nicholas were disqualified in the 200 freestyle relay, the first event of the meet.
While there were crucial points lost in the disqualifications, Bigelow was proud of the way her team bounced back.
"When you have a relay disqualification, it can take the wind out of your sails," she said. "But the team didn't let that happened to them ... The seniors pulled everyone together and kept everyone pumped up and said, 'We can do this.'"
"You just have to put it behind you and look to the races that are coming up," senior tri-captain Claire Pigula added. "So much of the meets are mental - it's hard to be pumped for three days in a row and be fired up when you're getting into the sixth session ... If you dwell on it, it affects how you swim."
The team rebounded in the 400 medley relay (ninth place; 4:05.73), 400 freestyle relay (ninth place; 3:40.60) and the 800-yard freestyle relay (eighth place; 7:59.70).
"We knew that in our regular-season meets, our second half was always stronger than our first and a lot of the events that we were good in were on the third day so we knew this would be our strongest part," Pigula said. "We got really excited [on Sunday] and moved up a couple of spots."
