This weekend, the men's and women's swimming and diving team traveled down to the Lone Star State and secured 10 automatic bids for the NCAA tournament.
Senior co-captain Carly Piper and sophomore Susan Johnson led the team by securing three class 'A' times (the standard necessary to qualify for the NCAA tourney).
Junior Amalia Sarnecki clinched two class 'A' times while senior Adam Mania and junior Anna Trinidad brought home one apiece. The 11th ranked women's team finished third in the competition with 603 points, while the 20th ranked men finished sixth in their meet with 323 points. Using their home-pool advantage, the University of Texas was able to win in both the men's and women's competitions. Overall, Head Coach Eric Hansen was pleased with his team's performance and his comments became increasingly positive as the weekend went on.
After the first day of the meet, Hansen voiced his concerns to motivate his team, saying, \I felt like we had a lot of highlights, but we could have been more consistent as a whole. We'll make some adjustments and hopefully be even better tomorow.""
The team went out and swam well the next day. ""We swam much better today. We have high expectations and met some of our goals today, but again we're looking to be better tomorrow-we believe we can be.""
""I thought we did a great job today. We responded really well to the adjustments we needed to make, and I couldn't be happier,"" Hansen said after the third and sixth place finishes.
Hansen remarked that one of the highlights included senior Carly Piper's 1650-yard freestyle race. Piper, who won an Olympic gold in the 800-meter freestyle relay, crushed the A cut of 16:23.54 with a score of 16:06.61. Piper finished two laps ahead of everyone else.
Johnson broke her own school-record in the 200-yard backstroke with a time of 1:55.42. Sarnecki gave the same treatment to her old school record in the 200-yard breaststroke with a time of 2:12.37. Senior Tim Liebhold finished 4th in the 400-yard backstroke with a time of 3:48.97, breaking the school-record in the process and earning a B cut for the NCAA tournament.
The diving team had a successful weekend as well. Juniors Amanda Witte, and Cassie Kubly took eighth and tenth place respectively, while freshman Justin Bonner nabbed a ninth place finish. UW had three divers who managed to place in the top-10 in the platform event.
""Amanda, Cassie and Justin had solid meets in the platform,"" said diving coach Josh Seykora. ""All were very good and consistent, and we're on our way to getting to be where we want to be."" The aquatic Badgers will have some time off to work hard and improve on their success over the weekend. Their next test will come Dec. 31 in Honolulu, Hawaii, for the Rainbow Classic.
-uwbadgers.com contributed
to this report.
