On February 27th 2016, UC San Diego’s Club Swim Team attended its first meet for the winter quarter at UCLA’s CISCA Invitational Meet. Our men’s team came in 2nd place with 510 points, while our women’s team came in 3rd with 337 points. Overall, UC San Diego placed 2nd with 847 behind UCLA’s 1294.5. 3rd place was awarded to the University of Oregon, followed by UC Irvine, USC and finally San Jose State.
Our swimmers did exceptionally well, since our size was less than two thirds that of UCLA’s. UC San Diego started off the meet strong, taking 1st and 3rd place in the men’s and women’s 200 yard medley relays, respectively. Our teams held our respective places for the 200 yard freestyle relays, with the men’s coming in 1st with a time of 1:32.65 and the women’s coming in 3rd with a time of 1:51.77. We performed even better for the 400 yard freestyle relay, with the men’s team securing the 1st again with a combined time of 3:35.55 and the women’s in 2nd place with a time of 4:09.36. A notable mention goes to captain Chase Campion, who achieved a split of 21 seconds.
Individually, many of our swimmers took first places in their events and many more set personal records. Of these were several exceptional sophomores: Andres Perkins took the 1st for 100 yard backstroke with a time of 1:03.73 while Kirsten Tang landed 1st for the 200 yard backstroke with a time of 2:24:62, smashing her former time of 2:40:00. Vylana Trang scored 1st for both the 100 and 50 yard breaststroke with times of 1:17.50 and 34.86, respectively. Lia Siegalman-Charbit, a graduate UC San Diego student from France came in a close second.
The captains also performed well at this event, with notable mention of Thomas Arnold, a senior engineering student. Arnold landed 1st place for the 200 yard butterfly with a time of 2:10.10 and 2nd place for the 100 yard butterfly. Fellow captain Kotachi Liu followed in 3rd place.
Amongst our new freshman swimmers this year, Martin Kushnerov’s performance was outstanding. He took home the 1st for the 200 yard breaststroke with a time of 2:16.12, as well as the 2nd place for the 50 yard breaststroke. Kushnerov placed 2nd in the 100 yard breaststroke and 3rd place in the 500 yard freestyle. Great job, Martin!
After a quarter of tough practices, it is clear that the team’s efforts have paid off. Our team has grown in both strength and size, and our results from this meet show great promise for a victory next quarter!
