The Wildcat men’s swim and dive team found the opening day of the NCAA Championships to be tough, ending day one with 92 points and in sixth place going into today’s events. Arizona falls behind Pacific 10 Conference counterpart California (103 points) in fifth place and the leading Texas Longhorns are setting the pace with 171 points.
“”I’m really happy the way some of the things happened,”” said UA head coach Frank Busch. “”We had a couple of relays we thought would do a little bit better, but it was great watching Jean Basson swim. That was a great effort by him.””
The team’s distance specialist, Basson made sure he lived up to the hype as he topped a school record in the 500-yard freestyle by nearly three seconds touching in at 4:08.92.
In reference to the 200y freestyle relay, Busch’s comments come after he watched his team of Jordan Smith, Nicolas Nilo, Adam Small and Joel Greenshields finish sixth in a time of 1:16.68. But that same team set a new school record in the morning preliminaries, finishing with a time of 1:16.22.
That time drop-off during the finals may have spurred Busch’s comments. Another strong preliminary was by Smith, who timed in at 19.09. But that time dropped to 19.37 in the finals, where he finished in eighth place with 11 points.
The winner in the 50y freestyle was California’s Nathan Adrian, who set a new American record of 18.71.
Meanwhile, Jack Brown found individual success in his 200y individual medley, scoring seven points and finishing in 10th place for the Wildcats.
Arizona finished off the evening with another sixth place in the 400y medley relay, where a team of Jake Tapp, Marcus Titus, A.J. Tipton and Nilo hit the wall in 3:06.50 seconds. Their second sixth-place finish of the evening, the Wildcats have now seen the depth of their opponents.
“”The teams ahead of us are swimming really well too,”” Busch said, “”so it’s going to be a tough, tough meet.””
And in the diving well, Ben Grado scored his first points in the NCAA meet, placing seventh in the consolation round of the 1-meter springboard event.
As for tomorrow, the team will need to swim their best to move up in the standings.
“”We have a big relay to start off tomorrow morning,”” Busch said. “”We’ve got an 800 (yard) free relay tomorrow night, which is key for us too, so we have two big relays and a lot of big swims. I’m hoping that we’re on our game.””
