Penn falls to Princeton but beats Cornell to start season

In its first meet of the season, the Penn women’s swimming team found out right where it stands in the Ivy League this season.

The Quakers came away with a split in their dual meet Saturday in Princeton, N.J., falling 160.5-128.5 to perennial powerhouse Princeton but knocking off typical bottom feeder Cornell, 172-128.

“The one thing about swimming is that there’s no defense, so if the other team’s really good you just do the best you can do,” Penn coach Mike Schnur said. “Princeton has some awfully talented kids on that team. I was thrilled with the way our women performed, and I thought it was a great start to the season.”

Penn swimmers placed first in five events, including encouraging victories in the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke by freshman Ji Young Lee.

Overall, coach Mike Schnur was really pleased with the Quakers’ performance, despite their loss to the Tigers (2-0, 2-0 Ivy).

Although Cornell (1-3, 1-3) has traditionally been overlooked as a competitor, Schnur was careful not to dismiss the Big Red this year.

“Cornell’s a good team now,” he said. “That’s not the same old Cornell team that used to be not too competitive. They’re very good and they’re going to beat a lot of teams in our league this year.”

The Big Red dominated the Quakers (1-1, 1-1) in the backstroke, as sophomore Emily Dean placed second in both the 100- and 200-yard events and classmate Chiara Spinazzola won the former with a time of 57.3 seconds. Penn senior Ainsley Cookingham finished seventh in the 100 with a time of 1:01.16 and paced the team in the 200 with a sixth-place time of 2:09.86.

Schnur pointed out that Cornell’s aggressive recruiting has started to pay off, as it has worked hard to build up a lot of girls in their freshman and sophomore classes.

“They’re bringing in 12 or 13 girls in each of these classes, and they’re very good,” he said.

But Schnur already has a strong crop of swimmers for himself, especially in the 200 free. He expects the trio of seniors Stephanie Nerby and Andrea Balint and junior Naomi Delphin to be faster than they’ve ever been, especially after this weekend’s performance.

“For [those] three girls to be 1:53, 1:54 and 1:54 at this point in the year is really fast. That’s going to beat most teams we swim against all year,” Schnur said. “Other than Princeton and Harvard, most teams don’t have one girl who’s going to be that fast, and we had three.”

Although Schnur was happy overall with the season opener, he said the meet also helped highlight what the team can work on to come out even stronger in the future. He named relay starts — both speed and technique — as one problem area, which resulted in a disqualification in the medley relay this weekend. He also cited a need for improvement in the team’s turns, particularly for the backstrokers.

“But other than that, I think we’ve set ourselves up for a pretty good team at the end of the year,” Schnur said.

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