Auburn Invite - Day Two - Finals

The Auburn swimming and diving teams had a solid middle night at the Auburn Tiger Invitational on Friday night, collecting 10 more NCAA times. Kirsty Coventry led the way with a win in the 400 IM and a second-place finish in the 100 breaststroke.

"Today was a much better day than yesterday. I thought the effort, the intensity and the enthusiasm were all up quite a bit more," AU Coach David Marsh said. "Kirsty had an outstanding night. The 400 IM is a top-time in the country right now and her 100 breaststroke time (1:03.24) was a career-best. Julie Stupp in the same event looked good."

Coventry easily won the 400 IM over teammate Hayley Peirsol as Coventry touched in a time of 4:11.29 while Peirsol clocked a 4:21.41. The freshman Stupp was third at 4:22.67.

Eric Shanteau continued his great swims in the 400 IM, clocking a NCAA-provisional time of 3:50.00. Mark Johnson (3:58.74) and Sean Osborne (4:02.39) finished third and fourth, respectively.

"Eric's 400 IM was a real good starting point for him this year and we look for him to be one of the favorites in the event at the NCAA championships," Marsh said. "We saw some other good swims by the guys that need to provide depth like Shai (Livnat) in the 200 free, Luke Weniger in the 100 fly (50.90) and Mark Johns's 400 IM was outstanding."

Emily Kukors was the fastest collegian in the women's 200 free, clocking a 1:49.09 while on the men's side it was BJ Jones winning in a time of 1:37.07, just ahead of Livnat's 1:37.74.

The AU women closed out the night with a NCAA provisional time of 7:18.54 in the 800 free relay, which was swum by Erin Volcan, Coventry, Adrienne Binder and Kukors. The AU men (Joey Schneider, Jones, Doug Van Wie and Ryan Wochomurka) went 6:36.94 to finish second.

In the diving well, Auburn's Steven Segerlin narrowly missed the school record on the 1-meter, scoring a 358.27 which was just .30 off of Matt Bricker's two-year old record.

Lynnsey Segraves also posted a personal best in winning the 1-meter with a finals score of 542.77 after posting a 269.17 in the opening preliminaries.

"It was good to see us competing hard at this time of the year with the distractions of finals and the hard training we have been putting in," AU Diving Coach Jeff Shaffer said.

The competition concludes on Friday. The prelims begin at 9 a.m. CT while the 3-meter diving competition will be held at 11 a.m. and the mile contested at 1:30 p.m. The finals start at 4 p.m. Admission is free.