Sweep this weekend gives women's swimming consecutive wins record

With all the established confidence of a Vanderbilt at the Waldorf, the women's swim team will cavalcade into Boston this weekend and launch its long awaited winter season with just one phrase on their lips: 41-0.

Surging in off several seasons full of more success than a post-World War I Wall Street, the Tigers will use their four consecutive Ivy League titles as well as an amazing 41-meet winning streak to provide the momentum to launch them into what could be their most dazzling season to date.

"Most people dream of having an undefeated season, and we've had five in a row," head coach Susan Teeter said.

The crown jewel of this opening weekend, however, will not simply be an extension of the Tigers impressively resilient string of victories, but the prospect of breaking a heavily coveted Princeton sports record: most consecutive wins for any Princeton team.

The record, now at 43-0, was set by the men's tennis team in the late seventies and has been left untouched for over 25 years. This weekend, however, assuming that the team will be up to the task of toppling Boston College, Northeastern, and Binghamton, the record will be reset, earning this team a place in Princeton sports history.

"We're incredibly excited about achieving the record, knowing it may be here for many, many years to come," Teeter said.

But while the record is quite an exciting prospect, the Tigers will definitely be glad to put this weekend behind them and move on to the more mainstream events of the winter season. Like a pompous speech given at the onset of a white jacket dinner party, an early defeat with so much on the line could cast a gloomy shadow on what otherwise would be a stellar season for Princeton.

"The team didn't know that the record existed until last February," Teeter said. "I wanted them to focus on swimming, and for it not to be a distraction. Everyone would like to see the record get broken so that we can put it behind us and look toward meets like Penn and Brown and Harvard."

As Teeter points out, moving ahead into the rest of the season is just as important an objective to the Tigers as setting this record. Princeton, while holding a well-known monopoly in the annals of Ivy League swimming, is by no means out of reach of the teams vying to knock it from the sky more quickly than could President Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust laws.

"As successful as we've been, the Ivy League is still always competitive" senior captain Stephanie Lawlor said. "We did graduate a lot of terrific seniors, and Harvard has recruited a ton of great freshmen."

Harvard, as well as Brown, Yale, and Penn, all have at least some chance of taking shots at Princeton, but, coming off of a preseason that demonstrated both the imperial might of the upperclassmen and the energetic vigor of the newly added freshmen, there seems to be an air of cautious confidence among the coaches and members of the Tigers' team.

"We have a lot of great freshmen coming in," said Lawlor. "Our preseason and early season scrimmages show that people are swimming really well, and if we swim as fast as we're able to, we will keep our streak going even longer."

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Streaks and records, Ivy League titles and undefeated seasons aside though, the Tigers, in the end, really want to see their swimmers make the NCAA Championship. While Princeton typically sends only two or three swimmers to NCAAs, Teeter has bigger plans for her team this year.

"This is my 20th season, and every year that we've been here we try to take one step closer to an elite level program in the national picture," Teeter said. "Last year we did not score in the NCAA picture and that is something that is a huge goal of ours. We'd like to send a minimum of four people to NCAAs, and not just have them going, but absolutely scoring."

With visions of broken records, long lasting streaks, and impressive NCAA performances, Princeton women's swimming has entered into a golden era of ridiculous successes, their own metaphorical Roaring 20s in which they are "putting on the Ritz" with amazing skill and efficiency.