By Drew McKelvy
The 2013 James E. Longnecker Invitational got off to a roaring start Thursday at Grove City College, with 6 PAC teams and 5 AMCC teams vying for their respective conference championships. This is the seventh consecutive year in which the two conferences have held their conference championships in tandem, and the host Grove City Wolverines came into the meet as multi-year defending invitational and PAC champions (4 years for the women, 5 for the men), while the Penn State Behrend Lions were trying to increase their number of AMCC championship sweeps to 7 in a row.
After the first night, the usual suspects are filling in the top slots in the team rankings, but they did not always get there in the usual ways. The Wolverines and their PAC rivals, the Westminster Titans, sit at the top of the leader board. For the women, Grove City holds a 280-230 lead, with the St. Vincent Bearcats breaking through into the top 3 with 184 points (the Bearcats finished 4th in 2011 and 2012), a sizeable advantage over the 4th-place Washington & Jefferson Presidents’ 102 points. The men’s meet is a much tighter affair, with the Titans holding a 221-216 lead, and Penn State Behrend is close behind at 198. As with the women, the President men are currently sitting in 4th place (140 points).
In the AMCC race, the women’s meet is the close one, with Behrend leading the Cabrini Cavaliers by only 10 points (68-58) and only 37 points separating worst from first. The men’s meet has the potential to make “blowout” look like the understatement of the decade. The Behrend men have score more points than the other three teams combined, and the second-place Pitt-Bradford Panthers’ 43 points is far short of the Lions’ 130.
The first event of the night, the women’s 200 free relay, saw the Grove City women score a B-cut time of 1:35.61 on the way to their third consecutive victory in the event. The Saint Vincent women earned their best relay finish ever, nearly earning a B-cut as the runners-up (1:36.65). Also of note, the Bethany Bison earned one of their best relay finishes in decades as they came in fourth (1:42.86) behind Westminster (1:38.68). The Behrend women came through as the AMCC champions with a time of 1:49.24, nearly three seconds ahead of second-place Cabrini.
The men’s 200 free relay was, almost as a sign of things to come in the men’s meet, a nail-biter. Behrend took the early lead off Dan Simon’s 21.09 opening leg. They failed to keep the advantage, however, and Saint Vincent exploded into a lead that held into the final leg, when Behrend retook the lead. A hard charge by Grove City’s Eric Fairchild in lane 2 (20.50 split) nearly gave the Wolverines the victory, but the Lions held them off by a margin of .12 seconds, 1:24.26 to 1:24.38. Saint Vincent settled for a close third (1:24.65), their highest relay finish ever in a race without a DQ at the top. Westminster nearly earned itself a top-3 finish but finished just barely behind the Bearcats at 1:24.81.
The women’s 500 free was particularly notable for its consolation final, in which, 300 yards into the race, the “leaders” were swimming 5 or 6 abreast, with no one gaining more than a shoulder length’s advantage over any of the others. The front leaders diminished slightly by the end, but the top 4 women in the heat finished within a second of each other (Saint Vincent’s Carolyn Claybrooks ultimately won the heat in a time of 5:26.89). AMCC champion Melinda Mackenzie from Pitt-Bradford also competed in the consolation final, finishing with a time of 5:34.62. The championship final was won in considerably more convincing fashion by Grove City freshman Megan Bilko, who cruised to a two-body-length victory (5:07.90) over teammate Tori Baker (5:11.97).
The men’s 500 was the least contentious men’s race of the night, with Grove City’s Dave Bossert pounding his way to a full body-length victory (4:42.75) over Westminster’s Alan Nedley (4:44.17) and Jimmy Newman (4:44.95). Penn State Behrend’s Brian Mong, the AMCC champion, followed Newman with a time of 4:50.47. As in the women’s 500, the men’s consolation final was notable, not because of a close race (W&J’s Ben Mancini led clearly through much of it and won in 4:52.20), but because 7 of the 8 swimmers earned faster times than the 8th-place finisher in the championship final.
The women’s 200 IM was led throughout by Grove City’s Jenny Ryan, who earned a B-cut with her time of 2:01.17. The runner-up, Lauren Cassano (2:10.59, also from Grove City), charged very late in the race, dropping three seconds off her prelims time and outstripping Westminster’s Amanda Marlow (2:10.69) and Kelsey Reott (2:10.71) in the freestyle by 1.6 and 0.6 seconds respectively. None of the AMCC swimmers managed to earn a spot in finals, but Cabrini freshman Courtney Good’s 2:24.07 was enough to win her the first conference championship of her career.
The men’s 200 IM gave spectators the most entertaining finish of the night, with the top two seeds, Behrend’ Javier Solivan and Grove City’s Louis Gabriele, battling each other at close quarters all the way through. After the two nearly tied in the butterfly leg, Solivan opened up a slight lead in the backstroke, which Gabriele then took away in the breast and maintained through the first 30-35 yards of the freestyle leg, in spite of Solivan’s efforts to close the gap. The final 15 yards were a neck-and-neck fight right to the wall, with Solivan prevailing by .11 seconds (1:54.57 to 1:54.68).
The women’s 50 free saw the first red-green championship final ever, as 3 Wolverines and 5 Bearcats—four of whom were sophomore or younger—earned places in the top eight. Grove City senior Angela Palumbo earned her second B-cut of the night (she was part of the Wolverines’ winning 200 free relay team) with a 23.85 victory. Mary McCulloch of Penn State Altoona (who will, coincidentally, be singing the national anthem for the crowd on Friday morning) won her team’s first championship of the meet with a time of 25.95.
The men’s 50 free turned out to be dominated by another Behrend-Grove City matchup, with Dan Simon and Eric Fairchild (who had already made waves at the beginning and end of the 200 free relay) going head to head, with Saint Vincent’s Zach Ligus keeping up for the first half of the race. Fairchild had finished second in the event three years running, and it appeared that he might end up with four silvers in four years, as Simon led through roughly 40 yards of the race before Fairchild finally closed with him. The last 10 yards was a dead heat, and Fairchild prevailed by the thinnest possible margin, 21.02 to Simon’s 21.03. Ligus finished a close third (21.18).
The diving, which saw the Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon preliminaries livened up with announcing in southern and Scottish accents, featured no NCAA cut scores, unlike what has become common in past years. The women’s 3-meter event ended with a victory by Behrend’s Meghan Wade, who led throughout the competition but only defeated W&J’s Jennifer Suder, the PAC champion, by the close margin of 400.40-391.70. Suder’s teammate John Szott won the men’s 1-meter competition with 395.85 points, a comfortable but not crushing victory over AMCC champion Andrew Neder from Behrend (373.85).
The Grove City women ran away with their last event of the night, the 400 medley relay, winning in B-cut fashion (3:53.22). The race for second, however, was somewhat close, as Westminster built a clear but tenuous lead over Saint Vincent. The Bearcats tried hard to close the gap late in the race, but the Titans were too powerful, and Westminster’s half-second victory in the freestyle leg sealed their runner-up status in the event (4:00.63 vs. 4:01.66). The Behrend women earned the AMCC victory in the event, once again holding off Cabrini for a two-second victory, in spite of Cabrini’s sometimes-sizeable lead earlier in the race.
Westminster, whose depth had shown itself throughout the night, finally won its first event of the meet by eviscerating the competition. The Titans built a 2-body-length lead after the breast, which they kept through the fly and then expanded even further in the freestyle. The team’s time of 3:23.90 was good enough for a solid B-cut, the only one in the men’s meet tonight (not counting the lead-off times by Westminster’s own Steven Brooks and Behrend’s Dan Simon). The closest team to Westminster was Behrend, whose AMCC championship time of 3:26.95 fell short of a B-cut by about a second. The race for 3rd between Grove City and Saint Vincent, while it ended with a full body-length win for Grove City, was actually not sewn up by the Wolverines until the final 50, when Eric Fairchild simply overpowered Matt Linebaugh. In fact, the Bearcats stood third overall in the race after the backstroke and again after the butterfly.
Friday will feature another day of exciting action at the Longnecker Pool, including the 800 freestyle relay, the event in which the Grove City women were ranked second on the national top times list coming into this championship season. The Westminster men will attempt to expand their razor-thin lead, while the Grove City women will try to make their lead invincible.
