Women's swimming and diving has monumentally successful weekend at NESCACs

By Kendall Weir '12
SPORTS WRITER

With record-breaking performances from team stars Megan Gibbons ’12 and Maggie Rosenbaum ’14, the Hamilton women’s swimming and diving team placed sixth at the NESCAC Championship, four spots higher than the team finished in 2010.

Hosted by Williams College at Muir-Samuelson Pool last weekend, 11 teams competed in the Championship this year. Rosenbaum and Gibbons broke records on each of the three days of competition, and the entire team was proud of the way they swam. “What our women did at the meet was unprecedented!” said Head Coach T.J. Davis.

The women placed eighth after day one in the pool. Rosenbaum swam the 50-yard backstroke in 26.24 seconds, a time good enough to break the pool record, the meet record and also the previous Hamilton record. She provisionally qualified for the NCAA Championships with her leg in the 400-medley relay; Gibbons, captain Liz Bucceri ’11 and Joanie Burton ’13 joined Rosenbaum to help the relay finish in fourth place overall.

Gibbons broke her previous record in the 50-yard freestyle swim to finish second overall by .01 seconds. Burton, Bucceri and Kate Rack ’11 impressed in their respective consolation finals events to close out day one for the Continentals.

Rosenbaum came out strong again on day two, breaking more records and automatically qualifying for the NCAA Championships in March. Rosenbaum set individual team and pool records in the 100-yard backstroke, in which she placed first.

She credits her teammates for support both at NESCACs and all season long: “I cannot thank all the girls enough for lining up on the side of the pool to ‘whip their hair’ for my walk out for the 100 backstroke,” said Rosenbaum, citing one of the several signatures the team had throughout the year.

She also swam with Bucceri, Burton and Allie Reeder ’14 to set a Hamilton record for the 200-medley relay, and she swam with Bucceri, Burton and Gibbons to set a Hamilton record for the 800-freestyle relay. Both relays provisionally qualified for NCAA Championships. With one day left to swim, Hamilton placed sixth with host Williams still holding onto the top spot.

“I think the signature moment of the entire weekend was before finals started Sunday night. We decided to time-trial the 200-medley relay in order to try and get a national cut,” remarked Bucceri. In this time-trial, she joined Burton, Gibbons and Rosenbaum to successfully reduce their time to a mark that would have placed first in the event on Saturday.

The moment right before the time-trial seemed to epitomize the women’s season as a whole. The Hamilton swimmers and divers started the team’s signature clap, in which nearly every swimmer at the Championship joined and watched as those four girls swam alone and cut nearly two seconds off their previous time to break the pool record.

Of the special moment, Rosenbaum said “I will never forget any of the relays I was a part of, but the 200-medley relay time-trial on Sunday night with Liz Bucceri, Joanie Burton and Megan Gibbons was, for me, the best moment of the entire meet.”

Rosenbaum kept a trend going and topped a 21-year-old pool record and also set a new Hamilton record in the 200-yard backstroke swim, in which she automatically qualified for the NCAA Championships. That marked three NCAA-qualifying, record-breaking swims for her in three days. Gibbons set a new Hamilton record in the 100-yard freestyle, finishing third in the event.

Bucceri swam the 200-yard breaststroke in just under two and a half minutes, which was good enough to finish first in the consolation final and ninth overall. Lizzy Buhl ’12 finished fifth in the 200-yard backstroke consolation final, which placed her 13th overall.

Diane Paverman ’13 participated in both one meter and three meter springboard diving events at NESCACS. She placed sixth on the one meter and eighth on the three meter board for the weekend.

The Continentals made a strong push to move up two spots from day one to day two, but some of the other teams were too strong to overtake. One of those teams was Williams, who took the NESCAC title in its own pool.

Looking back on the year as a whole, Bucceri said, “It was a really special year, between the dynamic of all the girls, beating Union for the first time ever for the senior class, and going from 10th last year to sixth this year at NESCACs. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end my four years here at Hamilton.”

Coach Davis reflected on the weekend: “Our team was together, tough and energetic this weekend. We had so much fun in doing what we did…we did everything that we needed to do as a team to sustain great performances throughout the weekend. To break four out of five school relay records is a tremendous statement of our team’s talent, tenacity, and hard work!” The men’s team heads to Bowdoin this weekend for its NESCAC Championships, hoping to be as successful as the women.