In its quest to catch up to perennial Ivy League powerhouses, the women's swimming team had the best season in program history.
Unfortunately for the Quakers, the teams they were chasing got better as well.
The Penn swimmers came up just short in reaching their elusive third place goal at the Ivy League Championships, finishing only 49 points behind Yale. Princeton, the meet's host, took the title while Harvard finished in a close second.
While it was a two-team race for first place throughout the weekend, Harvard and Princeton's battle for supremacy was not the meet's only story. Penn and Yale remained in close contention for third until the very end. The 72.5-point lead that the Elis built after the first day of competition, however, turned out to be too much to overcome.
"It was a weekend where no matter what we did, we couldn't seem to catch up to them," coach Mike Schnur said. "They deserve credit for holding us off."
Despite falling short of third, the Quakers experienced unprecedented success at the meet. Their score of 1,073, a 126-point improvement from last year, was the highest in school history - the team had never broken the 1,000-point mark before.
"Cracking 1,000 points was the best part of the weekend," Schnur said. "It seemed like we had more finalists this year than the last two years combined."
The team also managed to break six school records over the course of the meet. Freshman Sara Coenen broke the 200-yard individual medley record.
Penn even had races where two swimmers broke the standing school records. Tara Gillies and Stephanie Nerby broke the school's old mark in the 200-yard butterfly. The same happened in the 100-yard backstroke, where senior Stephanie Colson and Coenen placed third and fourth, respectively.
"It shows how good we are when we have two girls break school records," Schnur said.
The most thrilling record-breaking race, though, may have been from Gillies, who broke the 100-yard butterfly mark that had stood for 16 years.
Schnur said the fact that his team had experienced so much success yet were not able to climb in the standings is a testament to how much the league as a whole has improved.
"Ivy League women's swimming has never been better," Schnur said. "The times that were in [consolation races] are usually solid finals times. We broke all kinds of school records and we were the same as last year."
But with Penn's solid core of freshmen, many of whom had top-five finishes in races full of upperclassmen, the Quakers seem poised to make even more history in the years to come.
Meanwhile, swimmers from both the men's and women's teams participated in ECAC Championships over the weekend. The Penn men took eighth place while the women took sixth. Host Harvard won both the men's and women's meets.
The meet featured a few standout performances for the Quakers, including freshman Chris Buck, who placed fourth in the 100 and 200-yard freestyles and freshman Amy Reams who, recovering from pre-season shoulder surgery, took second in the 50 freestyle.
"It was great because a lot of schools don't get to experience championship settings," assistant coach Brendan Gallagher said of the meet, which gave some of Penn's swimmers who fell short of making Ivy League Championships a chance to swim again.
