Gainesville, Fla. – The University of Florida men’s swimming team gained significant ground on its opponents with two gold-medal winning relay performances, and the women’s team maintained its second-place status Wednesday night at the 2011 SEC Swimming Championships at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center. On the men’s side, the Gators gained 14 points on first-place Auburn (201) to finish the day in third with 129 points, while the second-place UF women (153) trail Auburn (166) by just 13 points heading into day two. Day one of the finals ended with one American record, five SEC records, six O’Connell Center pool records and three school records
“We closed the score quite a bit on the men’s side, and on the women’s side it’s clear that Georgia is the team to beat,” head coach Gregg Troy said. “We held our own with them (Georgia) tonight and slightly increased our lead over them tonight. It was a good night for us in terms of scoring, but we’re very much about primer performances, and we saw a lot of that tonight.”
For the eighth time in the past decade, the Gator men captured the gold in the 800-yard freestyle relay. The team of seniors Conor Dwyer (Winnetka, Ill.), Brett Fraser (George Town, Cayman Islands), Balazs Gercsak (Budapest, Hungary) and sophomore Sebastien Rousseau (Cape Town, South Africa) broke the SEC record with a school-record time of 6:13.74. The record was previously broken by Florida at last year’s meet by Fraser, Rousseau, Dwyer and former 27-time All-American Shaune Fraser. The automatic NCAA qualifying time was also an O’Connell Center pool record, and tied for the fastest time in school history. The time was the fastest in the NCAA in 2010-11 by almost nine full seconds.
In addition, to the record relay time, Dwyer’s 200-yard freestyle split of 1:31.73 broke the SEC record for the 200 free previously held by former Gator great Ryan Lochte, set at the last SEC Championships in Gainesville (2005). The pool record and automatic NCAA qualifying time was the second-fastest time in school history and was just one one-hundredth of a second behind David Walters’ (Texas) American and NCAA record of 1:31.72 set in 2009. Dwyer’s time was also the fastest time nationally this season by almost two seconds.
“We always have an expectation to win, but that race (800 free relay) was more of a toss-up,” Troy said. “We were really pleased with the swim; it was outstanding. Conor had a shot at that American record, but he’ll get another chance at it later this weekend.”
In the first event of the evening, Dwyer and Fraser teamed up with redshirt-sophomore Marco Loughran (London, England) and freshman Marcin Cieslak (Warsaw, Poland) to capture the Gators’ fourth-ever 200-yard medley relay men’s title (first since 2005). With Auburn having won the last five titles, the quartet of Gators (1:24.94) beat Auburn (1:25.52) to the wall by just over half a second to break the first pool record of the meet. The automatic NCAA qualifying mark tied the school record set in 2009 and is currently the fastest time in the country in the event.
On the women’s side, the Florida foursome of juniors Shara Stafford (Topeka, Kan.) and Teresa Crippen (Conshohocken, Pa.), sophomore Jamie Bohunicky (Gainesville, Fla.) and freshman Elizabeth Beisel (North Kingstown, R.I.) took second on the medal stand in the 800 free relay with an automatic qualifying time of 6:59.10. Florida’s time fell short of Georgia’s American, SEC and pool record first-place time of 6:53.58, but was still good enough for the fastest time in UF history and the second-fastest time in the NCAA this season.
In the women’s 200 medley relay, junior Sarah Bateman (Orlando, Fla.) partnered up with freshmen Alana Pazevic (Mill Creek, Wash.), Hilda Luthersdottir (Hafnarfjordur, Iceland) and Ellese Zalewski (Melbourne, Australia) to finish fourth with an automatic qualifying mark of 1:37.40. While the time was the fourth-fastest in school history in the event, the mark was just over a second behind first-place Auburn’s SEC and pool-record time of 1:36.11. Florida’s time was also the seventh-quickest in the country this season.
