Men's swimming places third behind Harvard, Yale at HYPs

When men's swimming and diving traveled to New Haven for the annual Harvard-Yale-Princeton double-dual meet held Feb. 1-2, the Elis were ready for their guests.

"Nobody comes to our doghouse and steals our bone," read the hand-painted banner hanging in Yale's historic Kiphuth Exhibition Pool.

The Elis were only partly able to live up to their banner bravado: Harvard took not just the bone but the HYP championship bucket, defeating Yale 194-159 and Princeton 191-162.

But Yale did parlay its home pool advantage into one win on the weekend, squeaking past the Tigers 177-176. This marked the 1,000th overall win for the Yale men's swimming program and left Princeton in third place at HYPs for the first time since 1999.

After an easy 164-92 home win over Dartmouth Jan. 31, the Tigers went into HYPs with 16 straight dual-meet wins over the past two years and a 5-0 dual meet record on the season; coming up short against both opponents was disappointing.

"We would've liked to have performed a little better just all the way around," head coach Rob Orr said.

"Anytime you go to a double-dual meet and come back losing both of them, that's not all that fun – especially just losing one by one point. Playing Monday morning quarterback, there's several dozen ways where a one-point turnaround could've been made quite easily, but just wasn't."

The Crimson had no problems defeating both the Elis and the Tigers, taking first or second place in 16 of 18 events. But Yale's win over Princeton was just as close as the one-point difference in their scores suggests.

After the first day of competition, the Tigers led the Elis 99-87. Princeton was able to maintain a slim lead for most of the second day, and entered the final event, the 400-yard freestyle relay, leading Yale 170-166.

The freestyle relays are one of Princeton's strengths. But the team of junior Jesse Gage, sophomore Mike Salerno, freshman Justin Chiles and senior Nathan Rebuck was slowed down when Gage's goggles came off at the start of the race, and ended up finishing fourth with a time of 3 minutes, 3.06 seconds. Senior Matt Keay, freshman Geoff Patterson, freshman Jeremy Tillman and senior Chris Cunningham put forth a strong effort, but their second-place finish in three minutes, 2.17 seconds, just over a second behind the first-place Elis (3:00.99), gave Yale the victory it needed to edge out the Tigers in the final tally.

Despite its team losses, Princeton did have some strong individual performances, including six first-place swimmers. Junior Garth Fealey won both breaststroke events and set two new pool records – 55.08 in the 100 and 2:01.61 in the 200. Junior Carl Hessler also set a pool record, in the 200 butterfly (1:48.48). Gage contributed wins in the 50 free (20.74) and 100 free (45.51), and junior Pat Donohue, Fealey, Hessler and Salerno won the 400 medley relay (3:19.03).

Although it fell short at HYPs, the team remains focused on its long-term goal for the season: dethroning defending champion Harvard when the Crimson host the Eastern conference championships Feb. 28-March 2.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

"It'll depend on how resilient the team is coming off of this," Orr said. "They can go one of two ways: they can either whine or cry and feel sorry for themselves, or be that much hungrier to come out on top."

The swimmers' comments suggest that they are heading in the second direction.

"We were disappointed by both losses," senior captain Matt Keay said.

"However, our best swimmers have been training hard recently to get ready for Easterns in four weeks. We were prepared to lose this weekend so our Easterns swimmers had a full taper for the conference championships.

"After the meet, Yale's coach, Frank Keefe offered some words of encouragement as we sat dejectedly on the side of pool: 'You guys are on your way to winning the Easterns championship.' We all hope, and believe, that he's right."

Hessler echoed these comments: "We do not see the losses as a setback. Since the beginning of the season, our goal has always been to win Easterns. We will be ready."