Penn - 130 La Salle - 101
The Penn men's swimming team was aching for a home meet unlike any other time during the season. After three extremely taxing matchups last weekend against Yale, Brown and even a usually putrid Dartmouth team, the Quakers entered Scheerr Pool on Saturday looking to dismantle an inferior La Salle squad quickly.
"You want to come out guns-a-blazin' and take the team out early," Penn senior captain Ian Bowman said. "Last week was definitely a tough week, and we just had to get back on track."
It's safe to say that the Quakers accomplished that mission, drubbing La Salle, 130-101. By the first diving intermission, Penn held a comfortable 60- point lead. The only reason that the final margin did not balloon towards 200 was that coach Mike Schnur declared the remainder of the events exhibition after the three meter diving, as not to run up the score.
Quakers sophomore Shaun Lehrer quickly unleashed his relief about returning to the familiar Sheerr waters, bursting to a definitive 1:43.90 victory in the 200 freestyle -- nearly four seconds better than last Sunday's time at Brown.
"That was definitely the best swim of the day," Schnur said.
And Lehrer's 200 freestyle would be only one of the 10 possible swimming victories during the day, all of which came in front of a boisterous capacity crowd honoring the seniors' final home meet.
"My sophomore year for Army and Cornell, those were really big meets that year, the whole stands were filled," senior Dave Housladen said. "But other than that, I don't recall seeing it this packed."
While families naturally flocked to see their seniors' last hurrah, a majority of the stand's fans was comprised of fellow students. Some of the crowd was even forced to a makeshift standing-room-only section, located in an open area above the bleachers.
Penn clearly put forth a clinic against an overmatched Explorers' squad, but the fans mainly focused their attention on the pinnacle of the seniors' swimming careers -- a group that is in many ways the charter members of a program that is on the rise.
"It's remarkable to see the level of training and competition go up," Hausladen said. "We've grown by leaps and bounds."
Almost immediately after Schnur took the head coaching reigns from Kathy Lawlor-Gilbert in the 2000 season, the Quakers saw improvement. Quickly jumping from 4-7 to 7-5 in one year, Penn has not stopped to look back.
"As a lot of the faster younger guys have come in, I've had to fight for position," Bowman said. "I've tried to set an example for the younger guys as the team has gotten faster."
The recruits certainly have flooded the Penn lineup in the past few years -- on Saturday, all but two of the eight individual swimming event winners were either freshmen or sophomores, the other two being juniors.
But despite the fact that no seniors grabbed individual gold Saturday, it was quite evident that it was their day.
Led by a particularly raucous row of former swimmers sitting only two rows from the deck, every time one of the five senior swimmers rose to the block for his event, the crowd expressed its approval with thundering applause.
"It was a culmination of four years of swimming, and I realized how much the team has meant to me," Bowman said. "It was very emotional."
While emotions soared on Scheerr's deck, the performances in the pool proved that Penn is more than ready to begin its final stretch of the season.
"We're begging for taper at this point," captain Russell Zuckerman said. 'We're hungry for it."
The Quakers will culminate their dual meet season against the defending Ivy League champions next week when they travel to Harvard.
After that all eyes will turn to the EISL and ECAC championships at the end of February.
"It's been a long, tough season," Bowman said. "It'll be good to start tapering and get ready to... kick some ass."
