The men’s swim and dive team concluded its team season this weekend in Cambridge, Mass., with a sixth place finish in the three-day Ivy League Championships. Last season, the Big Green finished fifth.
The team accrued 718 points, 777 points behind first-place Harvard University. Despite the sixth place finish, co-captain Nejc Zupan ’14 nabbed the Harold Ulen Career High Point Swimmer Award, thanks to his 361 points over his time at Dartmouth. Zupan took double firsts in the 100-yard and 200-yard breast stroke events with pool records of 53.52 and 1:54.29, respectively.
The meet standings largely reflected the season standings except the University of Pennsylvania clawed its way all the way up from fifth place in the regular season standings to third place in the meet, but was still well behind Harvard and Princeton University by almost 400 points. Cornell University and Brown University swapped spots at the bottom of the standings, but other than these small changes, the championship results mirrored the regular season standings.
“Penn just destroyed it at this meet,” Logan Briggs ’16 said. “I don’t know what happened between last year and this year, but everyone was just on fire.”
The diving team, comprised of Brett Gillis ’16, Taylor Clough ’17, Ryan Shelley ’15 and Ben Weill ‘14, clinched 128 total points for the Big Green. Gillis took second and fifth in the one-meter and three-meter dives, respectively. His one-meter dive score of 361.15 was a new varsity record for Dartmouth, breaking the 2007 record of 355.57 set by Andrew Berry ’08. Gillis said last week that while he aimed to take the record down, he was looking ahead to next season.
“Prelims were okay, they weren’t great,” he said, “but during finals everything just kind of came together. The one meter was really unexpected.”
The team’s high hopes for the 400-yard medley relay were not met, as the team of James Verhagen ’16, Zupan, David Harmon ’17 and Daniel Whitcomb ’16 finished in third with 3:12.49, 2.23 seconds off the NCAA A cut time.
Zupan and co-captain Andrew North ’14 cited the historically slow Blodgett Pool as a possible contributing factor to the team’s satisfactory, but not spectacular, times.
“You saw fewer NCAA qualifying times at this meet than you would’ve expected to see,” North said.
Despite the pool, several Dartmouth swimmers, including North, were able to finish the meet on a high note after a challenging first few sessions. North, who said breaking 45 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle has long been a personal goal, broke his own personal record in the event, posting a 44.93 in the preliminary heat.
Verhagen, who did not meet his pre-meet personal goals, managed to pull out second in the 100-yard backstroke with a 47.20 before taking third in the 200-yard backstroke with a 1:44.52. Though he can travel to a last-chance meet to try and qualify for NCAAs, Verhagen said as of press time that he was unsure whether to pursue that route.
Gillis will leave during finals for the NCAA Zone diving competition where he said he will attempt to place in the top eight. For Zupan, the swim season will drag out one more month before he travels to Austin, Tx., to compete in the NCAA Division I Championships. Hitting the proper taper for the meet, Zupan said, will be a challenge he faces in the coming weeks.
But the season has concluded for the rest of the team. For seniors like North who touched the wall for the last time in Cambridge on Saturday, that means ending a piece of their lives that included years of training, hard work, disappointment and triumph. That chapter, North said, can never really be closed.
“Going into the meet, I think that if I knew I would have had the meet that I had I would’ve handled it poorly,” he said. “But I saw something at Ivies I didn’t necessarily expect. I saw so many alumni in the stands who travelled to support swimmers they never even went to school with, and I realized that completing my intercollegiate competitive career is not the same as being ‘done,’ because the bonds forged between past, present and future members of the team last a lifetime.”
