When the men's swimming and diving team last visited MIT on Jan. 24, junior diver Rob Matera qualified for Nationals. When Tufts headed back to MIT this weekend for the Middlebury Invitational, sophomore diver Trevor Stack followed suit.
Stack, who qualified in the 1-meter dive with a 178.38 at the unscored meet, will join Matera at the NCAA Championships in Minneapolis for the first time in his career. He also took second place in the 3-meter dive with a 177.15.
"It felt really good to qualify for the NCAA Championships," Stack said. "I missed qualifying in the 3-meter by two and a half points, but then I managed to qualify in the 1-meter, so I was really happy about that."
"Sending two divers to Nationals is incredible," senior quad-captain James Longhurst added. "Our divers are so strong; we're proud to have them represent us in the championships."
The meet, the last before the NESCAC Championships, featured strong numerous strong teams such as league foe Williams. But as the meet, apart from Stack's qualifying performance, served as a tune-up before the long haul of NESCACs, the atmosphere was markedly different from what the Jumbos expect to experience in the conference meet.
Nonetheless, the Jumbos shattered some of their personal bests at the invitational. In the second men's event, freshman Joe McLaughlin took first place in the 1,650-yard freestyle, dropping 51 seconds off his personal best and beating the second-place swimmer, Saint Michael's freshman Austin Bell, by over a minute. Before the invitational, McLaughlin had only swum this event twice this season.
"One of the best races of the meet was the 1,650 freestyle where the only Tufts swimmer was Joe," Longhurst said. "Right from the start, you could tell he was not holding anything back, and he got faster and faster as the race went on. He ended up going an extremely fast time, and it really pumped the team up for the rest of the meet."
A highlight of Tufts' day came in the 400-yard freestyle relay final, in which the Jumbos placed the first through fourth finishers. The "A" squad, comprised of senior Matt Murphy, sophomores David Meyer and Andrew Altman and freshman Owen Rood finished first, four seconds ahead of the Tufts B, D and E teams.
Additionally, freshman Andrew Vidikan finished first in the 1,000-yard freestyle, barely edging out Williams senior Jeremy Goldstein by 0.15 seconds, while the 200-yard medley relay team of sophomore Matthew Glenn, junior Patrick Kinsella, Longhurst and Rood took first as well. Rounding out the Tufts winners were freshman Peter Debbaut in the 100-yard breaststroke, classmate Reed Shimberg in the 500-yard freestyle and Rood in the 50-yard freestyle.
The meet offered those swimmers who are not headed to the conference championships one last shot at improvement and setting personal records, while the Jumbos who will be competing at NESCACs had an opportunity to compete in events that they normally miss out on.
"This meet was the last meet of the season for the half of the team that was not going to be competing at the NESCAC Championships in 3 weeks," Longhurst said. "They came into the meet shaved and tapered and ready to swim their final races of the season."
"The performances of the swimmers who aren't competing at NESCACs really bode well for the future because they really stepped up and showed that our entire roster is good," senior Ben Mitchell said. "Meanwhile, the swimmers who are going to NESCACs got to swim in events that they haven't been in since high school. It was a fun meet."
The next two weeks are the final stretch before the swim team's biggest meet of the season. NESCACs will be hosted by Wesleyan on the weekend of Feb. 27. Tufts placed second in the 2007-08 meet, falling only to Williams, which has earned the title seven out of the last nine years.
"We're excited for what's up ahead," Mitchell said. "We've been saying all season that we know we can do it, and we still believe it."
