Tigers Continue to Dominate Ivy League

The Harvard women’s swimming and diving team may not have claimed the title at this past weekend’s Ivy League Championships in Princeton, N.J., but it certainly returned home a more decorated squad.

The Crimson set two Ivy League records and 12 school records in a second-place finish at a meet that featured a remarkable five new Ivy records in all.

“The level of competition and the level of fight were much above where they were in years past,” junior diver Samantha Papadakis said.

Mirroring the standings at the H-Y-P meet two weeks earlier, Princeton took first with 1,496 points, Harvard was the runner-up squad with 1,408.5 points, and Yale secured third with 1,122 points. Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell rounded out the rest of the Ancient Eight.

The Tigers had won five straight Ivy Championships when the Crimson stole the title in 2005. Last year, Princeton pulled off an upset of Harvard to return to the top of the League and cemented its stature this year.

The Tigers led at the end of all three days but the Crimson used every swimmer on its championship roster to inch closer throughout the competition.

“At our dual meets during the year, we need to win as a team but the focus is less on depth than on talent,” said Papadakis, who is also a Crimson editor. “If you win an event, you get nine points and the second through fifth places don’t match the first in points. But at Ivies, it’s all about depth—it goes all the way down to the 24th girl.”

The records started to stream in for the Crimson in the meet’s second event—the 500-yard freestyle.

Freshman Alexandra Clarke topped her own school record with a time of 4:47.29 in the finals, finishing second to Princeton freshman Alicia Aemisegger, who rewrote Ivy League history with a 4:43.50 swim and was later named Swimmer of the Meet.

Then, in the 200-yard individual medley, junior Lindsay Hart broke a Harvard record with a 2:02.28 second-place finish in the event.

Hart is predominantly a backstroke swimmer, so the record came as a bit of a surprise.

“It was really nice to start off with that second place,” she said. “It sort of came out of nowhere but I’ve been training [the 200 IM] really hard this year.”

In the one-meter dive, Papadakis took second to Princeton’s Katie Giarra but still managed to better the Ivy League record. Both Giarra’s score of 307.00 and Papadakis’s score of 285.70 exceeded the previous mark of 281.5 points, set in 2001.

The rest of the leaderboard was painted orange and black though, as Princeton grabbed the third and fourth spots as well.

“The level of competition in diving, especially in the finals, was a lot harder than it has been,” Papadakis said. “But it was refreshing to have some really tough competition and it definitely made us dive a lot better.”

The day concluded with yet another Ivy League record for the Crimson and yet another record for Hart, as she teamed with juniors Jaclyn Pangilinan, Bridget O’Connor, and Amanda Slaight to take the 400-yard medley relay in 3:43.33 and displace a mark previously held by Princeton.

“The 400 medley relay was an amazing swim, especially because we had disqualified in it two years ago,” Hart said.

On day two of competition, Harvard used six more school records to trim Princeton’s lead to 72.5 points—a differential of just two events.

The Crimson’s 400-yard medley relay team carried the momentum of its win on Thursday to capture the 200-yard medley relay in 1:43.02, bettering a record set by the squad two weeks earlier at H-Y-P.

Clarke continued to lead Harvard in the distance events, finishing second in the 1000-yard freestyle to Aemisegger and bettering her own school record in the event with a 9:51.62 swim.

O’Connor, who swam in seven finals for the Crimson, won the 100-yard butterfly in a personal best time of 55.29 seconds to provisionally qualify for the NCAA Championships.

Friday’s final individual event, the 100-yard backstroke, pitted Hart and three-year rival Moira McCloskey of Yale against each other yet again. McCloskey bested Hart by .23 seconds. But Hart avenged the second-place finish in the following day’s 200-yard backstroke, taking the lead from McCloskey with 50 yards remaining to win in an Ivy League-record time of 1:58.65.

Hart’s win brought Harvard within 3.5 points of the Tigers.

“Moira is always a really good competitor,” Hart said. “I wanted to take it out with her and just go for it in the last 100 yards.”

A school record time in the 800-yard freestyle relay on Friday, good for second place, as well as first-place finishes from co-captain Noelle Bassi and Clarke on Saturday also helped the Crimson close the gap.

Clarke won the 1,650-yard freestyle in 16:19.67, an automatic qualifying time for the NCAA Championships. Clarke and Aemisegger were the only swimmers to make “A” cuts at the meet. Bassi became a three-time champion in the 200-yard butterfly when she won the event in 2:00.06.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Compton can be reached at compton@fas.harvard.edu.