The Big Red didn’t swim like a team that had suffered 31 straight defeats to Princeton. They lit up their home Teagle Pool on Saturday, November 23 with fast swimming and impressive depth to beat both their guests: Princeton and University of Pennsylvania.
In Friday evening’s diving events, Princeton jumped out to an early lead with victories from freshmen Lisa Li (274.85 in 3-meter) and Caitlin Chambers (239.65 in 1-meter). Chambers was also second in 3-meter diving while Li finished fourth in 1-meter. Penn freshman Sivan Mills took third in both events; Cornell’s Herlitz-Ferguson was second and fifth in the 1- and 3-meter, respectively.
In a foreshadowing of things to come Cornell’s 200 medley relay (Victoria Kuhn, Kim Jerome, Stephanie Ah-Quah, and Jenna Immormino) broke the pool record and just edged out the Tiger quartet of Lisa Boyce, Olivia Chan, Morgan Karetnick, and Nikki Larson 1:42.69 to 1:42.73, thanks in no small part to a whopping 22.62 free anchor from Immormino. Penn’s Lauryn Brown, Haley Wickham, Lauren Church and Rochelle Dong were third in 1:44.98.
Beverly Nguyen (4:24.28) of Princeton won the 400 IM but Cornell’s freshmen, Billy Murch-Elliot, Currie Murch-Elliot, and Molly Orbon racked up points taking second through fourth. Penn’s Megan Alexander and Ellie Grimes were fifth and sixth.
Princeton’s Nikki Larson broke the pool record in the 200 free with her 1:51.06 win. Jennifer Zhang and Isabelle Cecere of Cornell scored next; Penn’s Sydney Stinner was fourth.
Another pool record went down in the 100 back when the Tigers’ Boyce won in a “B” cut of 54.62. Teammate Sada Stewart was second; Penn’s Church was third. Cornell’s top scorer was Kuhn.
Cornell senior Kim dropped a stunning 3 seconds from her seed time to win the 100 breast in a 1:03.79, less than a second off her career best performance. Princeton freshman Chan was second, a second ahead of Penn freshman Wickham.
Princeton’s Larson picked up her second win with a 2:01.99 rout in the 200 fly. Teammates Karetnick and Nguyen were second and third. Cornell’s Meredith Drummond picked up points at fourth, while Madeleine Jardeleza of Penn scored at fifth.
Cornell turned the momentum around beginning with the 50 free, where the Big Red women scored 1-3-4. Immormino won in a pool-record time of 23.01, just .01 off her own school record. Boyce of Princeton was second and also came in under the previous pool record time. Penn’s Emily Baturka was the highest-scoring Quaker.
In a repeat performance Cornell scored 1-3-4 in the 100 free. Immormino won and broke the pool record with 50.24; Boyce again was second; Irene Katopodis of Penn was fifth.
Penn’s Church won the 200 back in 2:02.19. Stewart of Princeton was second. Billy Murch-Elliot and Dani Sims of Cornell scored those helpful third-fourth points.
Heading into the 200 breast Princeton was up by nine points over the Big Red. But a 1-2-4 finish propelled Cornell to a 2-point lead, and they never looked back. Drummond (2:18.21) and Jerome took first and second. Princeton’s Chan was third. Lia Lombardi of Penn was fifth.
Cornell did it again in the 500 free, going 1-2-4 to continue driving a wedge between itself and Princeton and Penn. Currie Murch-Elliot dropped nearly four seconds off her seed time and won in 5:00.05. Her classmate Anna Elling was second. Princeton freshman Isabel Shipman came in third; Annie McCotter of Penn, fifth.
Princeton made a comeback in the 100 fly as Larson won her third event of the contest with a pool record of 54.70. Immormino of Cornell touched second and Penn’s Dong scored third. The next two events would likely decide the meet.
Cornell blew the field away in the 200 IM, as both Murch-Elliot twins and Drummond finished in the top 4. Billy was the winner in 2:04.81, Princeton’s Nguyen took second, and Penn’s Lombardi was seventh. It was an outstanding early-season effort by the entire Big Red squad, with a special hat-tip to the talented freshman class.
Princeton won the 200 free relay but couldn’t score enough points to win the meet. Karetnick, Liz McDonald, Mallory Remick, and Chan came within .03 of the pool record, winning in 1:36.09. The Quakers’ Dong, Katopodis, Baturka, and Brown finished second, while Big Red’s Louisa Hoffman, Chandra Yueh, Zhang and Ah-Quah took third.
Cornell University 156.00 – 144.00 Princeton University
Cornell University 207.50 – 92.50 University of Pennsylvania
Princeton University 208.00 – 92.00 University of Pennsylvania
Maybe Princeton didn’t suit up because they thought they would win regardless. Perhaps they were overconfident. Too bad for Princeton; great win for Cornell.
Why not race in each meet with a competitive suit. Go fast all the time. You should go faster as you learn and train through the season . I f you won’t go faster why train hard the next 3 months. Taper is a stupid word and gives excuses to go slow. I know I enjoyed dual meets at my little DIII school and tried to go fast each meet. And then to what ever bigger meets were at end of season to work to go fast at those meets. It was all out in all meets. Check out Ron Clarke the famous Aussie distance runner in 1965 ran in 44 days, 18 races and broke 12 world records at… Read more »
Yeah but 2chainz tho
#butthurt
When I first read this article, I had two simultaneous thoughts:
-Cornell really swam their hearts out, how impressive! and
-Princeton must have had an uncharacteristically weak recruiting class, what a shame.
Now I come back a couple days later and see all these comments, and while I still think Cornell did a great job and I’m really happy for them, I realize how Princeton and Harvard walk around with bullseyes on their backs. Everyone is out to get them and it’s a huge, huge deal when they go down. I’m not sure these student-athletes deserve that.
Again, terrific swimming and coaching from Cornell *earned* them the victory, just like crazy fast performances from Columbia took Harvard by… Read more »
I totally agree with Ivy Observer. Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Columbia are ranked as the 1st through 4th best Universities in the Nation. Who would turn that down to go to Penn, Dartmouth, Brown or Cornell who are only ranked 7th, 10th, 14th and 16th. It’s no coincidence that the top 4 schools have a distinct recruiting advantage and Princeton and Harvard duke it out for the 1 and 2 spots at the Ivies, Yale and Columbia for the 2nd and 3rd spots and the other schools battling for 5th. Luckily the Ivy league has tried to monitor this by allowing only 7 supported applications and monitors the academic qualifications of recruits. But in reality a Cornell cannot compete with… Read more »
I have a question. Does anyone know if its true that each Ivy gets to have only 7 supported applications? If that number is correct, then on College Swimming why does Penn show 10 swimmers and Princeton show 8 swimmers from the class of 2014 that have already responded that they have committed? Single Choice Early Acceptance decisions aren’t announce until mid December. Are divers included in the 7 supported applications? I don’t get it. Also does the Ivy league track merit scholarships and or the amount of financial aid that is given to the top athletes to make sure that money given is not just really a scholarship to attract top athletes guised under a different name?
Well, if anyone is interested in engineering, Cornell will be their top choice in the Ivy league without question. So that isn’t very fair to say considering there are so many different ranks for different majors for each university.
Just to clarify — I have never heard of a league-wide rule on the maximum number of supported applications. While the league does have certain minimum standards that it requires all recruits to meet, every Ivy’s admissions process is more nuanced and less than uniform.
Generally, the number of spots a coach is given and the specific academic requirements that its recruits must meet are are dictated by the school’s specific athletic department. And the athletic department usually sets these numbers based on what they determine as their “priorities.” For example, a school might choose to allow its basketball team to have a lower average Academic Index for its recruits, but balance that out by requiring the men’s swim… Read more »
To Guest’s comments: Yes heart or mental toughness does matter. One of Ian Thorpe’s Olympic teammates was quoted as saying “training is 90% physical and 10% mental, but meets are 10% physical and 90% mental. Cornell was mentally tough Saturday to say the least. They thought they could eek out a win against Penn and they went in hungry for that. Would you say that beating Penn by 115 points was because they rested on day and wore suits? The fact that Cornell feels so proud to win this meet is because of the respect they have for the caliber and pedigree of both the Penn and Princeton teams. Can’t we respect Cornell for what they achieved on Saturday? We… Read more »
Well you can quote Ian Thorpe all you want, but I never saw him take off his full legskin, armskin, high neck suit to test out his theory to see if his “heart” was enough to win the race. No one is saying that heart doesn’t matter, it’s just not enough. As for NCAA basketball, they all play on the same playing field. No advantages or disadvantages.
Ian Thorpe set his first WR in a speedo in 1999. If you actually physically look at the adjustments a tech suit makes, it is almost negligible compared to the time differences between point scorers on Princeton and Cornell. If the meet had been riddled with .01-.05 touch outs, your complaints might be mildly more valid. All arguments aside, the article never mentions Cornell suiting up, which would lead me to the assumption that, quite possibly, “Guest” was not only at the meet, but a participant on the receiving end of a non-ideal score… Generally, those with a bias tend to overlook or overstate certain aspects of the argument, usually leading to an incomplete opinion lacking in credibility.
This is getting rather absurd, truthfully. You do realize that in 1999, everyone wore Speedos and there was not a choice of wearing a technical suit or not? Thorpe did not forfeit a suit advantage to see if his “heart” or “mental toughness” was superior to technology. He did not play on a different playing field than everyone else. As for those with a bias tending to overlook or overstate certain aspects of the argument, wouldn’t that work in the bias in favor of Cornell too (i.e., the suits don’t make much a difference)? Finally, if you really think that a suit advantage accounts for only .01 – .05 touch outs, you need to do your research, lookitup. The last… Read more »
As for sportsmanship, there are a lot of ways to display poor sportsmanship, one of which includes giving oneself an unfair advantage.
Wow now you are the rule maker also? Where does it say suiting up is against the rules and poor sportsmanship? If a football reciever wears gloves and makes a great catch and your reciever doesn’t and drops a key pass I guess it’s poor sportsmanship to wear gloves only if you lose?
Cornell won. Princeton lost. It was a dual meet, thats it. Can you stop arguing about sportsmanship and suits and what not.
If you can truly say that they didn’t swim their hearts out, then shame on you.
Let them celebrate their win and everyone else will let Princeton celebrate their win if they win Ivys.
Enough.
My favorite coach in high school impressed on us that if we wanted to be proud of our behavior after a competition it was important to be gracious to our opponent when we won, but it was even more important to be gracious in a loss. I like the direction the last three comments took. I’m sure if the Princeton team were told ahead of time that Cornell rested on Friday and were going to suit up it would not have worried them at all. On paper they should have won suits or no. You can’t take away the fact that this Cornell’s women’s team can say on November 23, 2013 we were the better team. No one can take… Read more »
A terriffic victory for the Cornell Women! Why belittle a win? The Cornell team is competitive and talented. If a team wants to win after having the talent to compete after years of being beat by the Tigers who is to fault them? Why have a regular season if all that matters is the Ivies? These women on all teams are competitive athletes who work hard at their craft, why do the doubters challenge these athlete’s right to exceli in a competitive competition? Maybe the non Harvards and Princeton teams should just give their line ups and suiting decisions to their opponents and say oh well you deserve to win, we are not competitive athletes. Hogwash, a victory is a… Read more »
Maybe a victory is a victory to you. To me, it’s all about how you play the game.
Wow Guest, do you work in Public Relations? You made your point in your first comment. Your additional six comments lead one to believe you have sportsmanship issues. I don’t know how the Princeton ladies handled their loss, but I suspect most had the character to accept defeat with grace. Congratulations to Cornell, suited or not that was quite a meet! And I’m sure Princeton will swim great at Ivies.
u mad bro? cornell didn’t rest at all and still won