W. Swimming finds success at Easterns

Penn still did not beat anyPenn still did not beat anyother EISL teams butPenn still did not beat anyother EISL teams butcompared to recent year, itPenn still did not beat anyother EISL teams butcompared to recent year, itwas a marked improvement After drowning in two years' worth of marginal performances at Easterns, it seems that the Penn women's swimming team finally came up for a sweet breath of success. The Quakers competed in the Eastern Intercollegiate Swimming League championship meet Wednesday through Saturday at Brown. And although Penn did not outscore any one team, the performances in last year's championships and this year's championships are as opposite as the deep and shallow ends of the pool. For starters, the Quakers nearly doubled their total points from last year's Easterns. A year ago, Penn scored just below 60, but when the points were tallied up Saturday, the Quakers had well over 100. Secondly, a significant number of women swam at night. Each day, trial races are swam in morning and the top 16 places from those events go on to swim in the point-scoring races that afternoon. Last year, only senior captain Alison Zegar swam at night. This season many more Quakers made it to the final round. Zegar placed 10th in the 200, 500, and 1650-yard freestyle. The 200 freestyle relay and 200 medley relay placed eighth. Finally, Penn was enthusiastic throughout its four-day stay at Brown. "Last year we were all kind of mellow," sophomore swimmer Christie Meyer said. "This year we were really excited. Everyone was really ready to swim fast and perform like they should. We had a really high morale. And it was really exciting to watch more people swim at night." But as much as Penn improved, it still had not defeated a single EISL team when it climbed on the bus to ride home from Providence, R.I., Saturday. The Quakers had loosely set their sights on Army and Columbia. Penn handily defeated Army at their last meet of the regular season, and just lost by a two-point margin to Columbia in December. But at Easterns the only team the Quakers placed above was Boston College, a team not even in the league. "When you have full team that can qualify in the top 16 spots, of course your objective is to knock off teams," Penn coach Kathy Lawlor-Gilbert said. "But you can't learn to walk before you crawl. If my primary objective was for my team to beat Army and Columbia and I hammered them on that, I would have not prepared them. However, I told them that the primary objective was to do their very best time and focus on one event at a time." And the team did just that. Freshman Kelly James swam her lifetime best in the 200 butterfly. Freshman Alycia Kaufman broke her personal record in the 100 breaststroke. And senior Stephanie Reiter swam the 1650 freestyle for the first time ever and according to Lawlor-Gilbert, "She did an absolutely fabulous time." In the 200 medley relay, the Penn swimmer in every leg of the race swam her lifetime best split. The team is composed of James, Kaufman, freshman Lauren Ballough and freshman Liane Dos Santos. "[Dos Santos] swam like a maniac," Lawlor-Gilbert said. This medley relay is indicative of the promising future for this team -- all four swimmers are freshman. And even though the upperclassmen only made up a small proportion of the team, they will be missed. Zegar, Reiter and Gillian Beamer brought the team together, and led by both word and example. Now the Quakers look to the future after a spending years struggling to tread water. In 1992 and 1993 Penn had a good showing at Easterns. The next two years were different stories, with an unsatisfying, unhappy ending. This season's Easterns results, however, are refreshing, and the Quakers are hoping to build on those results. "We have work to do," Lawlor-Gilbert said. "We have [the seniors] to replace, which is going to be very hard. We have to bring in a good class, and get the diving troop stronger. I am not Pollyanna in the sense that I say that everything is so great that we don't have work to do, because we have work to do. But I feel much more confident with this group on my team because of the way they were at Easterns, because you're really putting kids under the gun at Easterns."