Swimming and Diving

Northwestern increased its score by more than 100 points from last year’s Big Ten Championships, but held its position as the second-worst team in the conference.

The Wildcats finished ninth for the third straight year, beating only Michigan State at this year’s meet in Iowa City.

“The place doesn’t reflect how well I think we did,” coach Jeremy Kipp said. “The men did a great job of competing. The relays moved up quite a bit. The best way to evaluate it is to look at how the seniors did, and we had a lot of seniors end on a lifetime-best time or season-best time.”

NU (3-6, 0-5 Big Ten) started the meet well, with a sixth-place finish in the 200-yard medley relay and an eighth-place finish in the 800-yard freestyle relay. The Cats sat in a three-way tie for sixth place after the first day of competition.

By the end of the second day, NU had slipped to ninth, where it would remain for the rest of the meet. Several seniors had solid meets, however. Will Hofstadter scored points in both the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke, Tyler Lis did the same in the 400-yard individual medley and the 200-yard backstroke and Jack Thorne made the scoreboard in both backstroke events. Justin Hanson also swam a lifetime best in the 200-yard butterfly.

Although the seniors performed well this weekend, the Cats are a young team, with 16 of 25 swimmers being underclassmen. Hofstadter said he thinks the team will be a lot better next year.

“It’s a really bright future,” Hofstadter said. “We’ve got a great freshman and sophomore class right now, we’ve got a great class coming in, and the coaches are just getting settled in, so next year they’ll be able to bring the program to a new level.”

Kipp praised the performances of sophomore Liam Gately, who earned NU points in the 1650- and 200-yard freestyle; senior Arjun Sharma, who made the finals in the 100 fly; and sophomore Jeffrey Durmer, who finished 10th in the 400 IM and 15th in the 1650 free.

Overall, however, the Cats could not keep up with the slew of ranked teams in the Big Ten, including No. 2 Indiana, No. 6 Michigan, No. 13 Ohio State and No. 24 Purdue.

“You walk away from a competition like this fairly confident,” Kipp said. “We did pretty well, we took some steps in the right direction. They’re pretty fired up.”

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