TicketsFeb. 20, 2008
East Meadow, N.Y. - The University of Cincinnati swimming and diving teams competed in the 28th BIG EAST Championship hosted by St. John's University on Wednesday (Feb.20). After day one, five events have been completed with the men holding onto sixth place and the women securing the ninth spot.
Finishing the day with 52 points, the men were led by the 800 yard free relay foursome of Nathan Williams (Cincinnati, OH/Elder), Jakub Carda (Brno,Czech Republic/Sportovni Gymnasium), Nate Kramer (Cincinnati, OH/New Richmond) and Stephen Cunningham (Dublin, Ireland/Terenure College). Their time of 6:41.99 finished in fourth place, Cincinnati's best finish of the day. The time was a seven second improvement over their seed time of 6:49.12. The men also turned in an eighth place finish in the 200 yard medley relay. The team of Jeremy Peter (Obernai, France/Lycee Freppel), Rob Langford (Mason, OH/St. Xavier), Josh Schneider (Cincinnati, OH/Taylor) and Mark Talma (Port of Spain, Trinidad/Fatima College) finished in a time of 1:32.69.
The women scored 46 points on the day, on the strength with two ninth place relay finishes. Shannon McCarthy (Valencia, CA/Williams S. Hart), Abi Bower (Pickerington, OH/Pickerington North), Elinore de Jong (Bussum, Netherlands/Goois Lyceum), and Lange Gilby (Cleves, OH/Taylor) completed the 200 yard medley relay in 1:46.06, knocking two seconds off of their seed time. The 800 yard free relay team finished with a time of 7:41.11, erasing more than nine seconds off of their seed time of 7:50.19.
Divers Kirtley Krombholz (Cincinnati, OH/Indian Hill) and Lindsay Bakan (Miamisburg, OH/Alter) competed in the meet's first event, the one meter dive. Unfortunately, neither was able to make it out of preliminaries. Krombholz narrowly missed qualifying for the finals finishing ninth with a score of 215.90 and Bakan ended 16th with a mark of 201.65.
The championships' second day starts with the women's 500 freestyle preliminaries at 10:00 a.m. on Feb. 21. Fans can catch all of the action live online by visiting www.bigeast.tv.