W. Swimming comes back to beat Big Green

Penn won its second Ivy League meet in nearly 50 tries on Saturday. On November 21, 1992, the Penn women's swimming team upset Cornell in their season opener, 168.5-131.5. Then, the Quakers forgot how to win a league contest, losing their next 42 Ivy meets. On November 20, 1999, Penn beat Cornell 153-145, ending that ignominious seven-year streak. But on Saturday afternoon, the Quakers made sure that embarrassing history did not repeat itself. With a stunning come-from-behind 158-142 victory over Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H., Penn gained its second Ivy win of the season and quelled any belief that the Quakers' win over Cornell was a fluke. The win was anything but easy. Penn trailed early, falling behind by almost 45 points, as Dartmouth's well-rested sprinters took advantage of the fact that the Quakers were somewhat drained from the bus trip to remote Hanover. "We were kind of hoping to go out in the beginning, win a bunch of events, get a lot of points and then kind of go from there," Penn junior captain Cathy Holland said. "That didn't really work out." Like the win over Cornell, Penn's meet with the Big Green came down to the wire. But unlike the win at Ithaca, the Quakers had to come from behind to have a chance at the 'W'. "At Cornell, we were winning right from the beginning," Penn coach Mike Schnur said. "In this meet, we were getting killed early in the meet. We were almost dead and buried. After a little break in the middle of the meet during diving, we regrouped and I reminded the women of why we were there and how hard they've worked." Schnur's talk catalyzed a furious Quakers comeback, similar to the one that brought Penn just short of victory at Navy the previous weekend. Dartmouth won only one event from that point on, and the Quakers consistently claimed valuable points by placing other swimmers highly on a consistent basis. Penn had its share of victors, too. Holland won the 200-yard backstroke and individual medley, while freshman Kate Patrizzi triumphed in the 100 and 200 fly. Kathy Sanderson claimed the 200 and 500 freestyle, and sophomore Devin McGlynn won the 100 free. The training regimen the team followed over winter break appeared to be a key factor in allowing Penn to get back into the meet after falling behind. "When our women got to their second, third and fourth events of the day, the Dartmouth girls were tired," Schnur said. "Every time they had to swim the second, third and fourth times, they were getting slower and slower, and our women were getting better and better." By the time the final event -- the 400 freestyle relay -- rolled around, the Quakers were confident of victory. "I talked to the women at the midpoint of the meet about taking it down to the last relay," Schnur said. "I knew our last relay was better than theirs, because we have more sprint freestylers than they do. They [McGlynn, Sanderson, Jessica Anders and April Fletcher] have a lot of confidence in each other and they know they get the job done. "It was a lot of work to win that meet Saturday," Schnur added. "It was very satisfying, because the Dartmouth women all felt great about themselves early in that meet and they were all happy and they were all cheering. And you could see event by event, they were getting lower and lower and lower." Penn and Dartmouth were not alone on Saturday. Yale swam against both the Quakers and the Big Green and beat them both, trouncing the Red and Blue by a score of 175-114. Penn then traveled to Rhode Island on Sunday to take on Ivy power Brown. The Quakers had many factors working against them in their final Ivy meet of the regular season. "Brown's just much better than we are," Schnur said, noting that the Quakers were emotionally drained from their victory over the Big Green the previous day and physically tired from the long bus ride to Providence. While Brown swam its best lineup, the Quakers put swimmers in unfamiliar events. Despite sophomore Kathie Dykes' second-place finish in both the 1-meter and 3-meter diving events, the Quakers were annihilated, 232-58, to fall to 5-6 overall and 2-5 in the Ivies.