The Dartmouth swimming teams are revitalized this year. The women's team has already tied its record for number of wins in a season. The men's team is poised to climb up the rankings ladder in the E.I.S.L.
Both the men's and the women's teams owe a great deal of their success to the vastly improved Dartmouth divers.
"It's hard to say which factor is the most important," Diving Coach Ron Keenhold said. "But certainly a big factor in the improvement has been the four men and four women [divers]. The level of talent within this group of eight athletes is quite wide. Each athlete within the group has worked hard to improve their individual performances."
In many meets, the divers have provided the points to keep the meet close and give the Big Green the momentum necessary to win.
Allison Ruff '95 leads the women's diving team. Her performances in Ithaca, N.Y. kept the meet close and enabled the team to beat Cornell. Against Princeton, Ruff was one of only two Dartmouth women to win an event.
Ruff has won at least one event at every meet the Big Green have competed in this year. She has won all but two of the three-meter competitions this season and has never finished lower than second. Ruff has improved her varsity records on both boards in the last three weeks.
The women's contingent is probably the strongest ever, while the men's contingent is larger and stronger than it has been in the past. Its newfound strength has played a key role in the team's improvement.
"They are training hard together," Keenhold said. "There really is strength in numbers. The competition within the team itself has allowed everyone to improve. There's something happening every minute at the diving end. When someone does a really good dive, it gets everyone else excited."
Last year, Ruff was the only diver to qualify for the Zone A qualifying meet. The Zone A meet is the regional meet where divers can qualify for the national championships.
She finished 13th out of 27 divers. This year both Ann Craig '97 and Sarah Hobson '97 are poised to qualify for the zone meet, coming very close in recent weeks.
Ruff has easily surpassed the qualifying marks repeatedly. At the Vermont meet, she beat the qualifying marks by more than twenty points.
Ruff's goal this year is to qualify for the NCAA Championship meet. To do so, she will have to finish in the top five at the zone meet, a task that she seems well on her way to accomplishing. This year's meet will be the second weekend in March.
The men's team owes just as much to its divers. It was the divers who brought Dartmouth within striking distance at the University of Massachusetts and it was the divers who kept the Big Green in the meet against Penn.
But Dartmouth's divers have not always been so strong. Last year Jeremy Turk '97 made up the entire men's contingent. Turk had relatively little competitive experience and was thrust into competition with some of the best divers in the nation last year at Navy.
But Turk improved throughout the year, winning the one-meter competition against the University of Massachusetts.
Turk has not been the same diver this year. Each meet he has improved, surpassing last year's point totals. His efforts peaked with a 188 point performance on the one-meter board, his best by 22 points.
The greatest strength of this year's team is its numbers, with the addition of Grant Cerny '95, Alex Katz '98 and Mark Devlin '98. Cerny took last year off from diving to go to England, but has returned to lead the divers. Cerny has performed well, challenging Columbia's top diver, before finishing a close second on the one-meter board. The freshmen have also contributed immensely.
Devlin turned in winning performances against Penn and the University of Massachusetts among others. Katz has faced more difficulties than the other divers as he was forced to compete with a back injury and a sinus infection. Still, he finished a close second to Devlin at UMass.
"I look for Alex and Mark, at this stage of the game, to have some type of success." Keenhold said. "But I'm looking for them to have much greater success in the future."
