For the fourth time this season, Northwestern stood on the precipice of a Big Ten upset as its 200-yard freestyle relay team dove off the blocks against Penn State. But for the fourth time this season, the Wildcats were split seconds and several points shy of capturing a win.
‘The way you’ve got to look at it is that we’ve taken four teams that annihilated us last year and taken them to the last relay this season,’ coach Jarod Schroeder said. ‘It’s bittersweet because we’ve gotten that much better but still can’t make the jump competitively.’
NU’s quad meet against Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State proved to be its fiercest Big Ten competition of the year. The Cats lost by their biggest margins this year, falling 263-67 to the Buckeyes and 261-67 to the Wolverines in their last meet of the regular season. The matchup against Penn State was closer, but NU’s four-point loss dropped its season record to 4-7.’ This wasn’t the first heartbreaking defeat for Schroeder’s squad-Iowa, Wisconsin and Indiana also squeaked out wins earlier this season in Evanston.
Schroeder said the Cats lost momentum in this weekend’s meet as well as in the other nail-biters this season because of their second and third tier of swimmers.
‘I was pretty disappointed with our second and third tier because they actually play a really significant role in the team’s success,’ Schroeder said. ‘The guys have to realize that getting out-touched doesn’t just mean that we’re losing a point. It means the other team is gaining a point, which is a mentality we need to have going into Big Tens.’
NU will have three weeks off before returning to Ohio State for the Big Ten Championships. The team will now begin to decrease the volume and intensity of its training in a’ process called tapering.
The ultimate goal is that the intensive training the team has gone through over the past month will improve the swimmers’ times when their bodies are given time to heal.
‘Especially for the freshmen after such a hard first year, the tapering can really make their times a lot faster,’ sophomore Nathan Butler said. ‘We’re really just hoping that with this rest the freshmen will explode onto the scene and really prove themselves at Big Tens.’
Butler, who posted a third-place finish in the 100-yard breaststroke, also said this weekend’s loss was also a lesson in competing against the best teams in the conference. No. 7 Michigan and No. 9 Ohio State will be leading the pack at the Big Ten Championships.
Juniors Alex Tyler and Sean Mathews and freshman Charlie Rimkus were the team’s largest point contributors last weekend. Mathews placed fourth in the 200-yard butterfly and fifth in the 50-yard freestyle, his best finishes of the meet. Rimkus balanced out Mathews’ sprint performance with a sixth-place finish in the 500-yard freestyle and an eighth-place finish in 1,000-yard freestyle. Tyler came in second in the 200-yard individual medley and fifth in the 200-yard breaststroke.
‘We went into the meet with the mentality that we were going to race our best guys to see how they stacked up against the best of best,’ junior captain Peter Park said. ‘We may have lost, but we proved that we can compete with anyone. Our goal in the Big Tens will just be to out-touch those guys.’ [email protected]
