Day 1 Results at the ACC Championships Show Good Signs for Pitt Panthers Under New Coach

2023 ACC SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Tuesday, February 14 to Saturday, February 18, 2023
• Greensboro Aquatic Center, Greensboro, North Carolina
• Defending Champions: Virginia (women); NC State (men)
• 2022 Results
• Full Event Schedule
• Championship Central
• Psych Sheets
• Live Results
• Live Streaming
• Day 1 Finals Live Recap

University of Pitt’s first year head coach Chase Kreitler has coached under some of the best in the country, having spent a few years with Eddie Reese at Texas followed by a more recent stint with the Cal Golden Bears and Dave Durden.

On the men’s side of the pool, those two programs are the top of the collegiate foot chain, period.

Kreitler walked into a tough situation at Pitt. Between transfers and retirement, the cupboard was left relatively-bare in the Trees Pool. There were some good bones there, they just needed the right coach to mold them to see better results.

Through one day of ACC Championship competition, it seems like they’ve found that coach.

Here’s a year-over-year comparison of day 1 results for Pitt.

They moved up places, and dropped big time, in three of their four relays. The exception was the women’s 800 free relay, where three of the four swimmers from last year’s relay (including two undergrads) are no longer on the roster; the 4th, last year’s anchor Jillian Berger, didn’t swim on this year’s relay.

The men’s 800 free relay dropped a whopping 6 seconds from last year, and here’s the stunning part: it’s the same four guys.

That side-by-side comparison is pretty incredible. Marcin Goraj dropped almost two seconds by himself on the leadoff leg; Guy Frimis dropped two-and-a-half.

The Pitt men’s medley relay was actually relatively-complete from last year. Led by Cooper van der Laan, the breaststroker, they only had to replace the butterfly leg. The big drop there was from Krzyzstof Radziszewski, who split 21.38 on last year’s relay leadoff and 20.70 on this year’s relay leadoff. That tied him with the defending NCAA Champion in the 100 back, Kacper Stokowski of NC State, as the fastest split in the field.

Krietler’s last program, Cal, is the best men’s backstroking program in the country year-over-year, so maybe that huge jump in men’s backstroke shouldn’t be a surprise.

Senior Flynn Crisci on the anchor leg dropped a couple of tenths too.

The best finish for the Pitt men in a relay at last year’s ACC Championship was 8th place. In 2021, their best relay finish was 7th.

Their last finish as high as 4th place came in 2019, when their 200 free relay placed 4th at the ACC Championships, led off by Blaise Vera, who would eventually land 7th at the NCAA Championships in the 50 free as a senior.

The women’s 200 medley relay also dropped a second-and-a-half with mostly the same relay, though freshman Claire Jansen accounting for four-tenths of that over her counterpart.

The butterflier Sophie Yendell improve by seven tenths over last year, while breaststroker Tatum Detwiler and freestyler Kate Fuhrmann also improved by smaller amounts.

While the Panthers were nothing special in the regular season, Kreitler earned his stripes at a pair of programs that, more than most, are focused on that end-of-season result, so that’s probably not a surprise. Cal is especially that way, and while I’m sure he’d like for that to be NCAAs in the near future, for now that meet is the ACC Championships.

The Pitt Panthers have a long way to go in a conference where a lot of teams are swimming well, and where a lot of the bottom teams have upward momentum (including Notre Dame, which had a good day as well under first-year head coach Chris Lindauer, but also had more talent to work with coming into the season). Their struggles with depth will show up more later in the meet. But for now, the early returns are trending in the right direction.