W. Swimming comes up short against Bears

The Penn women's swimming team fell to Brown and Army. Exhaustion, the dominating theme of Saturday's Penn women's swimming tri-meet, caused the Quakers to fall to both Brown and Army at West Point's Crandall Pool. But with the Quakers' recent heavy workload -- including an intensive winter break spent training in Miami and January 9's loss-avenging, diver-less victory over neighboring Drexel -- it should come as no surprise that the team felt a little fatigued on Saturday. "Overall I think it was a really tough meet, just because we were swimming against two teams and everyone was pretty tired from the combination of training hard in Miami and at school and then the Drexel meet," sophomore Cathy Holland said. Brown (4-1, 3-0 Ivy League), which leads the Ivy ranks after wins over Harvard and Dartmouth, annihilated the Red and Blue (2-3, 0-3) by 124 points, 193-69. Brown -- which beat Penn last year 200-69 -- scored its 193 points on the strength of first-place finishes in the 200-meter relay medley, the 100-meter breast, 200-meter fly, 200-meter back, 200-meter breast, 500-meter free, 100-meter fly and the 200-meter individual medley. "Since I was a freshman, Brown has been a strong team which keeps improving each year," senior Lauren Ballough said. "When you are winning meets, it's easier to keep your attitude high." Army (4-5) took home five first- place finishes to defeat the Quakers, 179-115. "We knew Army was going to be a tough meet. They are always competitive," Ballough said. "The home meet worked to [Army's] advantage." With that advantage, Army took home first-place prizes in the 400-meter free relay, the 50-meter free, 100-meter free, 1,000-meter free and the 200-meter free. Penn's fatigue determined its finishes in the majority of the races. Ballough, a native of Zelienople, Pa., was the sole first-place winner for the Red and Blue, claiming the 100-meter back title with a time of 1:02.25. Sophomore Patty Walsham placed second in the 100-meter fly with a time of 1:01.76, while classmate Holland finished second in the 200-meter IM with a time of 2:16.47. The Quakers' performance on paper, however, was not indicative of the way they swam. "It wasn't that people swam poorly -- people were just tired," said Holland, whose younger sister will be a freshman swimmer at rival Princeton next season. "They were swimming hard, just not fast. Everyone tried their best." It's this attitude that has shaped the younger Penn squad. "As a team I don't think that we'll let this meet get us down; that's not really what we are about," said Holland, a native of Wilmington, Del. "It is not the feeling or the spirit that we've created." Despite the fact that the Quakers fell to two teams in one day, Ballough believed that the team's intensive training regimen will eventually pay off with another notch in the "W" column. "[We] proved at yet another meet that we can still get in and compete even though we are tired and have been training really hard," Ballough said.