by Glenn Billman, news staff
Northeastern University (NU) swimming and diving competed separately in the last meets of the season. While the swimmers set nine season bests and one school record at Harvard University on Sunday, junior Alyssa Seales capped off the regular season by advancing to finals in both the 1- and 3-meter dives at the James Madison University (JMU) Diving Invitational Saturday.
Neither the Harvard meet nor the JMU Diving Invitational produced team scores, but head coach Roy Coates said the meets were a good opportunity for all the athletes to face strong competition and compete in some off-events.
In Cambridge, sophomore Carly Schnabel bested the school record for the 1,000-yard freestyle by almost 12 seconds, touching the pad with a time of 10:03.95. The previous record was set in 2014 by then-senior Colleen McCornack, and Schnabel dropped approximately 17 seconds since competing in the same event earlier in the season.
“I wanted to come out really confident because in a few weeks we have our conference meet and I thought a good race would definitely lift my spirits up,” Schnabel said. “The distance freestyle events I used to train when I was younger, like 16, 17. It’s been awhile since I’ve done them. I was going in focused, I was ready to go, I knew I wanted to have a good race, I set the expectation and I went for it. Anything that happened after that was just my training speaking.”
The 1,000-yard freestyle is only raced at some meets, and it is not one of the events in the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) championships. Schnabel has only swam the 1,000-yard freestyle once before, which made it easier for her to improve so drastically her second time around.
“[Schnabel] trains incredibly hard, she’s incredibly focused, she had good competition,” Coates said. “She might have a great performance curve even ahead of her, because that was the second time doing it. I think she shows great promise in that event. It was surprising for us the first time how well she did, so we certainly wanted to try it a second time.”
The rest of the swimmers ended the season with a splash. Junior Anila Mehta set two season bests: She came in first in the 500-yard freestyle with a time of 5:12.32 and knocked almost 18 seconds off her time in the 1650-yard freestyle for a third place finish of 17:46.80. Freshman Rachel Smith broke two minutes for the first time in the 200-yard freestyle and set another season best in the 100-yard freestyle, clocking in at 54.67.
Sara Touchette-McGowan, Angela Gyurina, Elizabeth Aldrich and Jordan Domeier also set season bests.
For four swimmers, Harvard was the last meet of their season due to limitations on how many swimmers can travel to the CAA.
“I think the meet as mostly trying to make it memorable for the people who are not going to CAAs,” junior swimmer Sara Touchette-McGowan said. “We made pom-poms, we made posters, we had gifts for them. So it was really about them more than it was about us.”
In Virginia, the diving squad matched up with Towson University, Clemson University and JMU. Seales took home fifth in the 1-meter and seventh in the 3-meter, notching 264.80 and 234.35 points, respectively.
“James Madison and Towson are, with ourselves, two of the other best diving programs in the conference,” Coates said. “So it was a great opportunity for them to see them two and a half weeks prior to when they’re actually going to compete at conference champs. So they went down there, they did well. I think mostly they got a sense of where they stand and what they need to work.”
The divers will match up again with Towson and JMU at CAA championships, which will begin Feb. 22. Coates anticipates the Huskies will post better scores and achieve more top finishes.
“The goal is to get 100 percent seasonal bests,” Coates said. “That’s what we train for, that’s what we peak for, so in the perfect world we should be at 100 percent at championships with seasonal best times. More than that, we’d like to end up with career best times, personal best times for them.”
For the team as a whole, Coates said they are still striving to place in the top three teams in the league.
“I think we’re really prepared,” Coates said. “We have two and a half weeks and what we do is we fine tune everything and we give them rest. So all that hard work they’ve been doing for basically six months, now they’re going to do what we call taper. We get to rest them so they’re as fresh as possible for championships.”
Photo courtesy Jim Pierce, Northeastern Athletics
