by Mark Murray
Six CAA records were racked up tonight in Fairfax. All done impressively and should get a few invitations to the Big Dance. Arni Arnason belted out a 1:46.97 in the 200 IM for the Monarchs of Old Dominion. Arnason's breaststroke split of 29.91 was too much for the field, although kudos goes to GMU's David Kiss' second place performance come from behind 25.39 freestyle leg that surged him toward the front. Arnason is on a tear spliting 52.87 in the winning 400 medley relay and popping off 19.69 anchor leg of the 200 freestyle relay. Look for Arni to close out his Senior year with some nasty breaststroke times tomorrow and Saturday.
The Madison women are taking charge. Coach Samantha Smith said, "we are sticking with our game plan, we don't change anything because its the conference championship, we want to have fun, care about each other and build momentum from today." The Dukes won both relays (200 free & 400 medley) in conference record times. JMU leads with 269 points with Towson lurking at 191. "We swam much better tonight than this morning," said Coach Pat Mead of Towson University. "I liked what I saw from our team tonight, Kaitlin Burke, Victoria Oslund and Cari Czarnecki all swam well. Our freshman sprinter Amanda Barber impressed me as well."
Coach Dave Allen of UNCW is pleased with the Seahawk start of the meet. "This is a great meet with a lot of competition. However, its a long meet and we need to keep an even keil. We need to take advantage of what we can and balance out other areas of the meet." Taking advantage is exactly what the Seahawk men did in the 50 freestyle tonight scoring 85 of their 221 points for the meet thus far to sprint into first place team rankings. GMU is right behind at 200 points. Preston Wolter claimed his 4th 500 freestyle championship tonight for GMU with 4:22.41 out dueling Freshman Kemp Pettyjohn of William and Mary, it was a fight to the finish with Wolter cranking a 24.73 on the final 50.