Swimmers look to maintain perfect conference records against Brown and Dartmouth

The men and women of Princeton Swimming and Diving will take their talents on the road this weekend for the final competitions of 2014. Nine swimmers will travel to Greensboro, N.C. to compete in the USA Swimming AT&T Winter National Championships. The rest of the athletes will bus north to Rhode Island to compete in the Brown Invitational, an important midseason meet that provides a taste of the all-important Ivy League Championships.

At the Katherine Moran Coleman Aquatics Center in Providence, R.I., the Tigers enter the three-day meet alongside Ivy League foes Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth and Yale, as well as non-league opponent Rider University. The competition, which begins Friday at 11 a.m. and concludes Sunday at 5 p.m., will serve as Princeton’s dual-meet with Brown and Dartmouth this season.

The men’s team (3-1 overall, 2-0 Ivy League) enters the competition ranked No. 22in the CSCAA National Division I poll. Junior Sandy Bole, junior Teo D’Alessandro, junior Byron Sanborn, sophomore Sam Smiddy and senior Michael Strand, five swimmers who have been instrumental in attaining this national recognition, will venture south to compete against many of the nation’s best swimmers in Greensboro.

Six hundred miles away, the rest of the Tigers will aim to deliver two more Ivy League victories for legendary coach Rob Orr, who accumulated his 300thand 301stcareer wins in his team’s last meet against Penn and Cornell. The former win came via a comfortable 192-107 margin, while the latter proved a stern early season test, with Orr’s squad eking out a 160-140 victory.

At Brown, the weekend will serve as a barometer for this year’s team — one with high expectations and a chip on its shoulder after last year’s second-place finish to Harvard in the Ivy Championships ended a five-year title streak. As Orr and his staff look ahead to selecting a team for the 2015 Ivy Championships, which will take place within the familiar confines of DeNunzio Pool this February, this meet will serve as an evaluative measure.

“This meet isn’t necessarily 100 percent about scoring … It’s not a big competition per se head-to-head, it’s more about seeing where everyone is at this point in the season,” senior captain Oliver Bennett said.

For this reason and for others, including an opportunity to rest ahead of a meet, Bennett stressed that the expectations this weekend will be especially high for the freshmen. Unlike the women’s team, the men do not send freshmen to nationals, providing each and every member of the class that was ranked top 10 nationally last summer a forum to showcase their skills for possible Ivy team consideration.

The women’s team (3-1, 2-0) enters this weekend with an identical record to their male counterparts, as well as a similar agenda. Like the men, the women prevailed in their opening Ivy meet of the season, beating Cornell 167-133 and Penn 183-117.

Five Princeton women will compete in Nationals this weekend. Sophomore Olivia Chan, junior Nikki Larson, freshman Lindsay Temple, and freshman Elsa Welshofer will represent Princeton in North Carolina.

Larson, an NCAA Championships qualifier last season, has been particularly impressive so far this fall. Most recently, she was a double winner against Cornell and Penn, winning the 200-meter freestyle in 1:49:50 and the 100-meter fly in 53.93. Larson and her Nationals counterparts also brought home the 400-meter medley relay in 3:47.68.

Chan, Temple and Welshofer have been impactful in their own right, each winning races against Cornell and Penn. Chan won the 200-meter individual medley in 2:05.64, Temple the 200-meter backstroke in 2:02.51 and Welshofer the 200 fly in 2:03.06.

Though renowned coach Susan Teeter — in the midst of her 31stseason leading the Tigers — and her team will miss this quartet of swimmers in Rhode Island, the squad is still determined to defend last year’s victories over Dartmouth (183-112) and Brown (178-117).

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Sophomore diver Caitlin Chambers should give the Tigers a boost in Providence, as she enters competition a perfect 4-4 on the season, sweeping both boards (1-meter and 3-meter) at Ohio State and again two weeks ago at DeNunzio Pool.

Though they are split between two teams and now by two distinct competitions, the Tigers of Princeton Swimming and Diving seem poised for another strong performance this weekend as they conclude 2014 and look ahead to 2015’s championship meets.