1988: M. Swimming sinks Princeton in record-setting relay

It's hard to blame the Princeton men's swimming team for being cocky in the fall of 1988. Princeton was the five-time defending champion of the Eastern Intercollegiate Swimming League (EISL). Winning every dual meet for almost five years, Princeton beat Penn in its early-season meets in each of the past 17 years. The Quakers, however, were coming off of their first winning season since 1971, only the second since 1947. They were 6-3 in the 1987-'88 season, and with a strong recruiting class, they hoped that 1988-'89 would bring the team's first EISL championship in 18 seasons. "The thing that comes to my mind is the excitement that the younger guys generated," said Steve Kuster, then a Penn swimmer and now an assistant coach at Harvard. "I think that on the teams that I've coached in the last couple of years, there's been strong older leadership, but that team had a lot of youth and a lot of energy." Princeton came to Scheerr Pool the Tuesday before Thanksgiving with a confident swagger, perhaps thinking of breast meat instead of breaststrokes. "They always took us lightly," then Penn junior Michael Morgan said. "But they changed up in the middle of the meet because it was really nip and tuck after the first diving, and they might have taken it a little more seriously after that." The races went back and forth until the score was tied at 53-53 going into the final event -- the 400-yard freestyle relay. The Red and Blue could salvage the surprising afternoon against their rivals only with a win in the day's last event. "I said, 'You've got it this far and you did everything you possibly could,'" Penn coach Kathy Lawlor-Gilbert said. "'And now it's up to you, go and get it, and don't let it up.' And they didn't let it up." Morgan, now an investment banker, leapt off the starting blocks to kick off the relay, a position with which he was comfortable. "I always really liked swimming relays," Morgan said. "And the first thing going through my mind was don't false start so that we get disqualified. But beyond that, swim as hard as you can because the guys behind me were very good." For Kuster, the relay was one of his three team records for the day. He had earlier set team marks in the 200-yard individual medley and 200-yard butterfly. A little bit tired, he kept things close for his teammates. "I knew that I was swimming against one of their top sprinters," Kuster said. "I was really just hoping to keep it close, but he kind of took off, and I was scrambling. I wanted to at least be even, and I think I did." When Mark Hjelle, a freshman, hit the wall after 3:05:42 -- eleven-hundredths of a second ahead of Princeton's relay -- there was jubilation at Sheerr Pool. "It was definitely the most exciting dual meet of my career," Kuster said. "It was definitely enjoyable to beat a team that was taking us lightly and say that maybe they shouldn't have been." At the time, it felt like the end of the losing era for the Quakers, but the Red and Blue would swim inconsistently for the rest of the season. They wound up with a 5-4 record, one of only five winning seasons since World War II (1947, 1971, 1988, 1989, 1991). "We had a program that lost, and consistently lost," Lawlor-Gilbert said. "We went after Princeton, and we felt like we got those long years of losses off of all of the Penn swimmers' backs." Lawlor-Gilbert is hopeful that her current team can similarly build on its upset of Cornell two weeks ago, and reach the above-.500 promised land of Penn swimming. She remembers the past and sees a similarity which fills her with hope. "They're scratchy, and they don't give up," Lawlor-Gilbert said. "Why not try it?"