Swimming against some of the toughest opponents the program has ever faced, the Northeastern swimming and diving team ended the three-day Princeton Invitational with seven school records and a fifth-place ranking out of the 12 competing teams.

“It was the best competition we’ve ever competed against as a team,” said coach Roy Coates. “There were many swims at this meet that were the fastest swims of the entire season.”

The Huskies totaled 335 points at the invitational.

Coates saw the meet as an opportunity to give his swimmers an understanding of what will be expected from them at the end of the year.

“This event more than exceeded expectations,” he said. “The purpose of this was almost a dress rehearsal for championships. To go down there and perform as if it was the end of this season was beyond expectations.”

Out of the seven records that were broken, five were individual marks, and the other two were set by relay teams.

Senior Katie Kane, along with juniors Kelly McIsaac and Katie Schmaling, each broke individual school records in the 100 breaststroke, 200 freestyle and 100 backstroke respectively. Sophomore Sarah Reddick set two new school records, in both the 100 freestyle and the 100 butterfly, and the 400 and 800 freestyle relay teams capped off the day with record-setting swims of their own.

“Those are people who are just getting better within the program,” Coates said. “We’ve never come close to breaking seven records in an in-season meet. I don’t think we’ve ever broken more than seven records in any kind of meet.”

The University of California at Berkeley placed first overall, with 1,022 points, and host Princeton University finished second with 841. The Huskies have regularly competed with Princeton, including a match up this past Nov. 15, but facing Berkeley was a whole new test.

“This was a great meet. Cal-Berkeley being there raised the level of competition. Princeton is outstanding and Cal-Berkeley is just unbelievable,” Coates said.

Third-place finisher Rutgers tallied 554 points on the day, and fourth-place Villanova ended up with 424. Boston College, who took sixth, finished with 268.

This invitational also marked the first time Northeastern had faced either Rutgers or Villanova.

“They’re both top 30 or 35, certainly top 50. We competed right with them, so that was a really good sign. It was good to also see we were comfortably ahead of Boston College. It showed us to be well ahead of BC at this moment, and closer to Rutgers and Villanova than a lot of us might have thought,” Coates said. “To face the level of competition we did, and step forward and meet that challenge, as opposed to wilt in the background, says a lot about the team. It was an incredible competition in all areas.”

The team will be in training from now until January, when they have three meets in a nine-day span against Harvard, Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire.