University of Richmond Athletics
University of Richmond
Atlantic 10 Championships
Richmond Perfect In Day One At A-10 Championships
02/20/2014 | Women's Swimming & Diving
The Richmond swim team scored the maximum amount of points on the two relays contested Wednesday using eight different swimmers to take the lead after Day One of the Atlantic 10 Swimming and Diving Championships, held at the SPIRE Institute in Geneva, Ohio.
In the first scoring event of the meet, the 200-yard Medley Relay, Richmond's team of Maggie Pope (Nashville, Tenn.), Mali Kobelja (Fort Wayne, Ind.), Kelley Yang (Ellicott City, Md.) and Laura Jordan (Tampa, Fla) won by nearly a second over Fordham for 40 points and the strong start that head coach Matt Barany had been talking about this week. The time of 1:41:09 was less than 1.5 seconds from the Championships record set by Richmond in 2012.
Later in the evening, the 800-yard Freestyle Relay saw Richmond win by 13 hundredths of a second over Massachusetts to claim the second 40-point score of the day on the women's side. Richmond raced Natalya Ares (Potomac, Md.), Allison Titley (Richmond, Va. / Saint Gertrude), Molly McSweeney (Stoneham, Mass.) and Meredith Gouger (Cockeysville, Md.) in that relay for the Day-One sweep. Their time of 7:23:14 was just under 3.5 seconds from Richmond's own A-10 mark in that event as well, and less than 1.5 seconds from Richmond's record in that facility set last year. Gouger had never swam the anchor leg of a relay at a Championship event, and she shaved nearly six seconds off her previous-best time in this relay.
"It's going to be a tight meet, and it took all of us working as a team to post these times and get these results," said Barany at the end of the night.
"We distributed the work to eight different swimmers, and the calculated risk paid off. I think we were nervous tonight. The only freshman who swam today, led off for us. We felt we had nowhere to go but up in the 800 and Meredith on the anchor leg came up big for us."
The Spiders are 20 points clear of George Mason, with Fordham and Rhode Island scoring 58 points in the opening day.
Thursday, individual events get underway for the women, with three swimming and one diving prelim to be contested in the early session, followed by the late session, where the 500 and 50 Freestyle finals, and the 200 Individual Medley will conclude, as well as the women's 1m diving finals. The night is capped off with the 200 Freestyle Relay team competition, as the Spiders will try to continue their sweep of these double-points-scoring events.
Players Mentioned
