W. Swimming wins in first home meet

Two weeks, two wins and too much for Georgetown. The Penn women's swimming team easily handled the Hoyas Saturday afternoon at Sheerr Pool, 182-109, in front of a large contingent of Quakers supporters. With the win, Penn improved to 2-1 on the young season (1-1 Ivy) and looks forward to hosting Ivy foe Columbia this Friday. The Quakers' home opener featured a multitude of standout performances, perhaps the most outstanding of which was junior Cathy Holland's. Penn's captain finished first in both the 1000-yard freestyle and 200 breaststroke with times of 10:38.4 and 2:25.9, respectively. She set a personal record in the latter event while missing sophomore teammate April Fletcher's school record by approximately .6 seconds. "It was a great swim considering it was the first time she's swum the event for real in two years," Penn coach Mike Schnur said. "That was probably the highlight swim [of the meet]," Fletcher said. Other outstanding performances on the day included sophomore Devin McGlynn's wins in the 100 and 200 freestyle and freshman Katie Patrizzi's first-place finish in the 200 fly with a time of 2:07.4. "For her to go 2:07 unrested is a very, very good swim," Schnur said. "It's a heck of a lot faster than she ever went in high school." Patrizzi -- who recently qualified for the Junior Nationals -- was joined by a number of other successful freshmen. Margaret Jones finished first in the 200 individual medley; Lauren Dawe won the 100 backstroke; and Jessica Anders was tops in the 50 freestyle. In addition, the freshmen are contributing to the success Penn has had in relay swimming this year. Saturday was no different, as Patrizzi and Anders joined McGlynn and sophomore Adriana Pentz on the first-place 200 medley relay team. The team that won the 200 free relay was also made up of two sophomores and two freshmen. "The freshmen are all swimming awesome, they're training really hard. They're really doing well," Fletcher said. "It's nice to have a young team." The Hoyas, who were only minimally rested last week in practice, seemed to be hindered all day by a lack of swimming depth. The third-fastest Georgetown swimmer was routed in many events. "They had six or seven good, solid women who definitely could swim for us," Schnur said. "But their backup girls are nowhere near the level ours are, so their girls who were their number one swimmer in each event were pretty strong, but their number two and number threes maybe weren't as strong as ours." That, combined with the fact that Penn consistently beat Georgetown's top swimmers by taking first place in every swimming event, allowed the Quakers to soundly trounce the Hoyas. Penn's win is impressive considering that its swimmers practiced hard last week. This was not the case earlier in the season, since the Quakers rested the week before the meet with Cornell and Princeton. "We had a lot of really good swims considering that a lot of people were really tired from a hard week of practice," Fletcher said. In fact, the only spheres in which the Hoyas finished in the top spot were the one-meter and three-meter diving contests, where they accumulated 26 points to Penn's six. "They're a good group of kids. They're strong, they're pretty deep, and hopefully they'll be more competitive in the Ivy League," Georgetown coach Bethany Bower said of the Quakers. "We knew we were outmanned going in." The Quakers themselves might be outmanned come Friday, when Columbia, led by Christina Teuscher -- possibly the nation's best collegiate swimmer and an Olympic gold medalist -- invades Philadelphia Friday evening. Schnur intends to give his team another week of intense practice, and although he acknowledges that the Quakers have very little chance of taming the Lions next week, he is happy with what he is seeing. "We swam better than I thought we would," Schnur said. "They're gaining confidence every week. And they're swimming better and better."