Rohrer leads Tufts to fourth place in NESCAC

After three days of racing this weekend, the men’s swimming and diving team finished the 2015 NESCAC championships in the same position as last year. Tufts ended with 1,086 points for fourth place behind perennial champion Williams (2,065.5), Amherst (1,579) and Connecticut College (1,323).

Unsurprisingly, the divers were the team’s highlight of the meet, continuing the Jumbos’ dominance off the boards in the NESCAC. Sophomore Matt Rohrer won the one-meter on the first day of competition on Friday, keeping the title that Johann Schmidt (LA ’14) won for Tufts the past three years. Though Rohrer was unable to defend his own title in the three-meter, he still took second place in that event on Sunday.

Rohrer finished second in the preliminaries of the one-meter Friday morning but came back to beat out Williams’ Rohann Bhatt and Amherst’s Asher Lichtig that night to record a pool-record 499.95 score for first. In the three-meter preliminaries, Rohrer placed third behind Bhatt and Lichtig before being just narrowly edged 515.20 to 503.90 by Lichtig in the finals.

“I'm really happy with how I performed,” said Rohrer. “No one is ever happy when they lose, especially getting second place by a small margin, so I'm pretty bummed about that, but it was still a good weekend with some good diving.”

Rohrer believes the slight difference in result between the two events stems from simply not quite executing all of his dives in the three-meter as well as he did in the one-meter.

“On one-meter definitely [I was 11 for 11], and on three-meter I would say I was nine for 11,” Rohrer said. “A couple of my dives weren't where they should have been.”

Nevertheless, Rohrer was awarded the NESCAC Diver of the Meet award for his performance, and Tufts diving coach Brad Snodgrass earned his fifth consecutive, and seventh overall, NESCAC Diving Coach of the Year award.

First-year diver Aaron Idelson also had a strong showing at the meet for his NESCACs debut, placing eighth in the one-meter and then seventh in the three-meter.

Though Rohrer’s first- and second-place finishes were the highest of any Jumbo on the weekend, several swimmers were also big point scorers at the meet. Junior tri-captain Michael Winget was arguably the team leader in the lanes, breaking three school records and swimming two NCAA B cut times on the weekend.

Winget’s first school record came on Friday in the 50 backstroke, where he swam a 23.07 in the preliminaries to break his own record from last year and then went on to finish third in the final. That same day, his 100 backstroke leg of Tufts’ 400 medley relay also broke his own record from last year and was good enough for a B cut. On Saturday, Winget again hit the B cut mark swimming in the 100 backstroke, where he tied for third in the final.

And on Sunday night, he was the top finisher for the Jumbos in the 200 backstroke in perhaps their best event of the meet. All five Jumbos swimming the 200 back swam B cut times, with Winget placing fourth and setting a new school record, first-year Panos Skoufalos placing 11th, sophomore Luca Gaudagno placing 12th, first-year Zachary Wallace placing 13th and first-year Jacob Siegelbaum placing 17th.

Guadagno and Wallace also shined for the Jumbos in the 400 individual medley (IM) on Saturday. Both swam B cuts in the preliminaries, with Wallace finishing eighth (4:03.97) to break the school record and Guadagno finishing 10th(4:04.90). Both then went on to impressively drop even more time in the finals.

Guadagno went down to 4:02.00 and took the new school record, though he failed to qualify for the final (reserved for the top eight in the prelims) with his ninth-overall finish. Wallace dropped more than a second in the final and finished seventh with a 4:02.87.

“I was so excited to drop time in my four IMs this year,” said Guadagno. “I think I was able to [drop that time] because I felt really solid during my prelims swim and knew that I could go faster in finals. I took that confidence into finals and tried not to hold anything back. Not to mention I was really motivated by Zach's amazing prelims swim. I knew I had to step up my game to compete with him and the rest of the swimmers.”

In one of the Jumbos’ top relay finishes, the 400 medley team of Winget, first-year Morgan Ciliv, sophomore William Metcalfe and junior tri-captain Cam Simko finished fifth with a 3:23.20 time that broke a six year-old school record and was under the B cut mark.

In the team’s other relays, Tufts took fifth in the 200-medley behind Winget, Ciliv, Metcalfe and Skoufalous; fourth in the 800-freestyle behind Simko, senior tri-captain Mike Napolitano, first-year James McElduff and junior Anthony DeBenedetto; and fifth in the 400 freestyle behind McElduff, Simko, Skoufalos and junior Harry Wood.

Ciliv, DeBenedetto and Simko all had individually strong performances as well. In his NESCACs debut, Ciliv placed seventh in the 200 breaststroke, setting a new school record by almost three seconds and earning a B cut time. He also shaved time off of his 100 breaststroke and recorded a B cut that was just 0.03 seconds off the school record, though due to his performance in the preliminaries, the highest place he could get was 17th.

DeBenedetto recorded a B cut time in the 200 butterfly, where he placed ninth to lead a group of four Tufts swimmers that placed in the top 15. Simko also added a B cut in the 500 freestyle preliminaries before taking sixth in the finals.

Though Tufts did not improve on its fourth place finish from last year’s conference championships, coach Adam Hoyt’s team can be proud of the six new school records it set and the 13 B cut times they put down at the meet.

Williams, Amherst and Conn. College have consistently been powerhouse programs in swimming and diving, so it was no surprise when the three jumped out to an early lead in points on Friday and never looked back.

In a thrilling comeback, Tufts rebounded from being in fifth place behind Bates after the first two days to claim fourth place by 117 points after a strong showing on Sunday. Arguably the Jumbos’ most impressive day even though it did not see the team’s highest point scoring, Sunday saw the most Jumbos make the finals of any of the three days, and as Guadagno noted, displayed the team’s prevailing camaraderie and relatively high energy.

Wallace noted a similar level of energy at his first NESCAC meet as well.

“My teammates and I get a tremendous energy boost for these kinds of meets,” said Wallace. “With swimming, we're all training very rigorously all throughout the season up until about two weeks before [NESCACs]. When the championship meet finally arrives, we're all very rested, shaved down and ready to rip out some crazy fast times. That's the beauty of swimming, it really all comes down to one meet where we can really see what all of our training has done for us, and that's what can cause the energy level to skyrocket. I like to call it ‘go time.’”

Rohrer and Idelson will next represent Tufts this weekend at the Zone Qualifiers in Springfield, where the two hope to qualify for the NCAA championships in March. The swimmers' season is now over, except for those that recorded B cut times. All they can do now is wait to see whether their times qualify them for the NCAA field.

Ciliv, one of those anxiously waiting to see if he will be going to the NCAA championships or not next month, is already thinking ahead to how to prepare.

“We need to perfect the racing by knowing our race inside and out,” Ciliv told the Daily in an email. “For example, we need to optimize and know the number of strokes we take and our pacing ... I think swimming and the process towards improvement should be taken like rocket science, entirely based on learning, science and knowledge, yet should be very specific to each swimmer. There is so much to take away from this entire season and championship meet, we just to need apply our learning and apply ourselves in a revolutionary manner.”