Add one more destination to the women's swim team calendar: Aspen, Colo. Even though Penn's season is over, some of the swimmers aren't finished competing.
Teammates Tara Gillies, Cammie Villarreal, Laura D'Erasmo, Amy Reams and Nicole Malgeri won a giant Sudok. make that "Snowdoku" puzzle challenge in New York City's Bryant Park on Tuesday and earned a trip to Aspen for their efforts.
As the name suggests, the Snowdoku competition was played out on a 30-by-30-foot board made of ice.
Teams had up to 20 minutes to solve the puzzle, strategizing on a small dry-erase board and using a giant pencil to place oversized number tiles into their slots on the ice board.
The spectacle was part of a promotion by Chrysler, which is unveiling a brand-new SUV, the Aspen. While on the trip, the team will get to ride around in the Aspen SUV.
Registration for the event took place online, and ultimately six teams were chosen at random to participate.
"We really didn't think we were going to win," Villareal said. "We were just going to have fun."
It was Gillies's mother who told the women about the contest. She knew they enjoyed doing Sudoku and suggested it to her daughter.
According to Gillies, the quintet "are huge dorks, racing each other on the bus. So I figured they'd be good teammates to have out there."
She added that they are "pretty good at Sudoku. We can do the hard ones, but not the really hard ones."
Their strategy was to have two people - Gillies and Villarreal - working on the dry board while the other three ran to put the numbers on the larger-than-life board.
"We had the advantage of going last," Gillies said, "so we had the advantage of seeing what worked and what didn't. We knew that the faster we could get the pieces on the big board, the better off we would be."
The Penn swimmers finished in a mere four minutes and 26 seconds.
While that time wouldn't have won the 500-yard freestyle on Tuesday in New York, it was good enough.
"Winning was really the icing on the cake," Gillies said. "We get to go on a trip together. And it's actually a really nice car, too."
