Men's swimming ends grueling month by sailing past weak Black Knights

Among the big cats, the tiger is known to be a good swimmer with slight man-eating tendencies. The men's swimming and diving team generally lives up to its mascot in these respects. Real tigers, however, only resort to attacking humans when they become too old to kill their natural prey. The relatively youthful Princeton Tigers had no such reservations as they – in the words of the Army athletic department – "devoured" the Black Knights in Saturday's dual meet, 144-92.

The Tigers (4-0), entering the meet with 14 dual-meet wins in a row, were never in any real danger of losing to Army (3-4). Still, the team was careful not to write off or underestimate the Black Knights.

"Just being back at West Point, where Easterns were last year, got a lot of us fired up to race," sophomore Kevin Weiner said.

"This being the last meet of a draining month of tough training and a lot of racing, we didn't really know what to expect from ourselves or Army."

Last week, head coach Rob Orr said he expected the Army meet to be "somewhat of a challenge, just because last weekend was the Army-Navy dual meet. Obviously that's a huge battle where both teams shave down and stuff, so they're a little bit more primed and tuned up than we will be."

But just as the Black Knights had been no match for the Midshipmen the week before (Army lost to Navy 160-83), they were also no match for the Tigers.

Princeton got off to a strong start, going one-two in the 200-yard medley relay to begin the meet. Juniors Patrick Donohue, Garth Fealey, Jesse Gage and Jamie Leahy finished first in one minute, 32.85 seconds.

The Tigers went on to win the next four events in a row, taking nine of thirteen in all, and demonstrated their depth by taking at least the top three spots in the 1000 free, the 400 individual medley, the 200 butterfly, the 200 backstroke and the 500 free.

As part of their display of dominance, the Tigers made a clean sweep of the freestyle events, one of the team's most noticeable strengths, taking first in the 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000.

Senior Kevin Volz set the pace in the distance events, taking first in both the 1000 (9:23.12) and 500 (4:34.82) free.

Gage led the short distances, winning the 50 (21.17) and 100 free (46.54).

Freshman Justin Chiles, who has been a strong addition to the freestyle corps this season, also contributed a win in the 200 free (1:42.88).

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The Tigers also got first-place finishes from junior Paul Cremer in the 400 IM (4:06.91), Weiner in the 200 fly (1:54.17) and sophomore Steve Fleming in the 200 backstroke (1:51.53).

In the scoring of the meet, Army won just two swimming events, sweeping the 200 breaststroke and 400 free relay. In both of these events, however, Princeton swimmers actually posted faster times than Army swimmers, but were swimming exhibition races.

The Black Knights did edge out the Tigers in diving on the strength of Matt Lofton's career-best performance, which qualified him for the NCAA Zone Championships. Princeton freshman Nick Lee was second to Lofton in both events.

Despite entering Saturday's meet somewhat fatigued from recent training, Weiner said, "a lot of us still put up some fast times, and we're going to use that momentum through December as we get back to hard training in preparation for more meets in January."

The team has a long break from competition before it next seeks to extend its now 15-meet undefeated streak. Princeton hosts Dartmouth at DeNunzio Pool Jan. 27, then travels to New Haven Feb. 1-2 for the Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet — arguably the first real challenge of the season. That will be the team's first opportunity to see how it matches up against perennial Easterns rival Harvard.