Men’s Swimming and Diving Finishes Seventh at NESCACs

The Middlebury men’s Swimming and Diving team competed in the 2016 NESCAC Championship meet last weekend, Feb. 19-21, at Williams’ Samuelson-Muir pool, finishing seventh as a team for the third consecutive year. The hosts racked up 1789.5 points to claim their fifteenth title to date against the ten other NESCAC teams, followed by Tufts (1410.5), Connecticut College (1407), Amherst (1315) and Bates (956) to round out the top five.

“Coming into [the] weekend, we knew we would be most competitive with Bowdoin and Bates [based on] the last few years,” co-Captain Andrew Fleisher ’16 explained.
“Because every team trains differently at various points in the season ... we didn’t really know what to expect from either of them,” he continued.

The Panthers finished much closer to Bowdoin (834.5) and the sixth-place position than they did last year, and the team recorded three individual podium titles in the process.

Paul Lagasse ’16, Fleisher’s co-Captain, emphasized that “almost every member of the ... team swam to their fullest potential [during the meet], Middlebury swam beyond every expectation this weekend, and just saying that we came in seventh place doesn’t capture that in the slightest.”

The 200 free relay team of Bryan Cheuk ’16, Lagasse, Jack McLaughlin ’18 and Stephan Koenigsberger ’16 came in fifth with a time of 1:24.35, only 0.63 seconds behind Tufts in the first final on Friday, Feb. 19.

Other highlights of the day included Koenigsberger’s seventh-place time of 26.12 in the 50 breast — a mere milliseconds behind his sixth and fifth-place competitors — and Mike McGean ’17’s consistent performance in both the prelims and the finals of the 500 free that earned him sixth in the event (4:39.18 in the final and 4:37.56 in the prelim).

McLaughlin nearly made the top ten in the 50 free; his 21.50 time in the prelims and 21.51 in the final clinched the 11th place spot and the quartet of Brendan Leech ’19, Koenigsberger, Alex Smith ’18 and Lagasse ’16 placed eighth in the 400 medley relay (3:29.23).

Will Greene ’19 took fifth on the one-meter diving platform with a score of 411.10 to close out the day, helping to place Middlebury in sixth place by the end of day one.

McGean’s previous times this season in the 1,000 free placed him just 1.39 seconds behind Tufts swimmer Brandon Jinn for the event title on Saturday, Feb. 20. When the evening’s competition rolled around, McGean bested his own school record by 0.51 seconds to win the event by a margin of 4.39 seconds (9:32.36).

Building on his teammate’s success, Koenigsberger made the podium with his third place finish in the 100 breast (56.08). Koenigsberger’s times in both the prelims and the finals of the 100 breast qualified as NCAA ‘B’ Cut times.

Middlebury’s swims in the 200 medley relay (Smith, Koenigsberger, Cheuk and Lagasse, 1:34.77) and 800 free relay (Smith, McGean, Leech and Connor McCormick ’18, 7:09.49) proved good for eighth and ninth place, respectively.

Though the Panthers trailed just six points behind Bowdoin at the start of day three, they weren’t able to re-claim the sixth position. Middlebury’s seventh place time of 3:07.23 in the last event of the meet — the 400 free relay — by Lagasse, McLaughlin, Smith and Koenigsberger cemented the Panthers’ standing in the meet.

On that same night, McGean recorded the NCAA ‘B’ cut time of 16:02.45 in his 1,650 free victory — his second gold-medal swim in the meet. He touched the wall 3.72 seconds before the second-place finisher from Connecticut College in this third-straight top-four finish of his NESCAC career.

Koenigsberger also swam to fifth place in the 200 breast, stopping the clock in 2:06.24, and on the deep end of the pool, Green placed fifth in the 3-meter diving competition with a score of 416.20 in the finals.

“This weekend and this season was a huge success,” Fleisher reflected. “We scored about 160 points more than last year as a team, which shows great improvement. I ... think we showed our depth a lot more this season with over 20 of 24 guys scoring. Getting points from nearly everyone demonstrates the strong foundation of the program and that we are moving in the right direction.”
Lagasse echoed that “while we may have come in 7th last year as well, we were so much more successful as an entire program this year, and I couldn’t be happier with that.”

If McGean’s and Koenigsberger’s NCAA ‘B’ cut times qualify them for nationals, the two swimmers will have a few weeks to train before travelling to Greensboro, North Carolina on March 16-20 for the NCAA Division III Championships.