Just hours before the Penn women's swimming team faced Cornell and Princeton in a tri-meet at Sheerr Pool on Saturday, Rachel Zappalorti was hit by a car while riding her bike.
Yet the sophomore butterflyer tested her ability to swim through the pain during warmups, and ultimately chose to push her limits during the meet.
"I decided to give it a shot," Zappalorti said. "I didn't want to back out, I just wanted to stay in there and do it for the team. I didn't know how I'd swim for myself, so I just got in there and did whatever I could."
The Quakers split the tri-meet, grabbing a 178-118 victory over Cornell and losing, 163-126, to Princeton. Zappalorti claimed second place in the 200 fly, touching out Princeton's Melissa Garton by .04 seconds with a time of 2:08.41.
"She got run over on a bike an hour and a half before the meet and got up there and still won her race!" Penn coach Mike Schnur said. "That shows the toughness of our team -- I like that."
While Zappalorti's story testifies to the ultimate cohesiveness of the Quakers' effort, Penn's best performances of the meet belonged to a pair of freshmen named Katie.
Midway through the meet, Katie Frazee erased Jacqueline Bak's nine-year-old Penn 100-yard backstroke record en route to a third-place finish in 58.80 seconds. Despite grabbing one of the hallowed Penn records in only her second collegiate meet, Frazee isn't content.
"I hope things can only get better," Frazee said.
Three events through the meet, Katie Stores nearly claimed a spot for herself on the Penn record board, too. Penn's freshman sensation took second in the 200 freestyle, just .07 seconds away from the record that Penn's current captain, Devin McGlynn, set last year at the Ivy League Championships. Stores also finished second in the 50 free (24.39) and dropped nearly a full second from last week's time on her way to grabbing the blue ribbon in the 100 freestyle in 52.51 seconds.
"She's scary fast," Schnur said. "She's already one of the two or three best swimmers in this league, but she's set herself up to be dominant by the end of the year."
Stores' efforts would be epitomized in her anchor leg of the 400 freestyle relay.
"There's a lot more pressure on a relay," Stores said. "All the work that everyone has done before you comes down to you. Swimming for other people makes me swim a lot faster."
Penn's freestyle enthusiast entered the water in third behind both Princeton and Cornell's top swimmers. But behind one of the fastest relay legs in the history of the school -- 51.20 seconds -- Stores led the Quakers to a first-place finish in the event.
In the general scheme of the meet, Princeton easily cruised to wins over both Penn and Cornell, defeating both teams by 40 points. Powered by the especially potent distance freestyle races and the Kate Conroy-led backstroke events, the Tigers grabbed their first two wins on their way to defending last year's undefeated Ivy League season.
"I'd definitely consider this a successful meet," Princeton's Conroy said. "Even though we were tired from the week of tough practices, everybody came out and pretty much did their job today."
While the Quakers did not come close to beating Princeton, they did, however, dominate Cornell on their way to their first Ivy League win of the year.
"We really battled Princeton, and we were a better team than Cornell," Schnur said. "No matter how much I beat on them in practice every day, they just refuse to swim slowly, and it's going to pay off come the end of February."
With times and records dropping so early in the season, it's evident that the hard work has paid early dividends.
