Men's Swimmers Earn All-America Honors
March 27, 2003 | Men's Swimming & Diving
The University of Wisconsin men's swimming team picked up four All-America honors on the first day of the 2003 NCAA Championships. The Badgers finished eighth in the 400-yard medley relay to lead the team to a 14th-place finish after the first of three days of competition.
'I'm happy. I think we swam well,' said UW coach Eric Hansen. 'We had a great morning which put us in position to continue to move upward. We're only seven points out of 10th (place). It's a good place for us to be.'
Wisconsin scored 38 points with athletes competing in finals in three of six events. Auburn leads the meet with 206 points while Stanford is second with 121 and California third with 115. Defending NCAA champion Texas is fourth with 107 points.
In the relay, the team of Adam Mania, Eric Zakrzewski, Matt Marshall and Dale Rogers finished eighth in 3:12.48 to earn All-America honors.
Marshall, Mania, Rogers and Eric Wiesner also finished 10th in the 200-yard freestyle relay in 1:19.62 to pick up honorable mention All-America honors. In the preliminaries, the quartet set the UW record with a 1:19.03 clocking. The previous best mark was 1:19.17 set by Marshall, Rogers, Lance Jones and Brendan Coyne last season.
'I'm really proud of our relays. (They) did what we hoped they would do,' said Hansen, whose team finished 18th at the NCAA meet last season.
Marshall also swam a UW record of 19.77 in the preliminaries of the 50-yard freestyle to qualify for the consolation final. The Chico, Calif., native fell off in the finals, finishing 15th in 20.02. Marshall broke the previous UW best mark of 19.94 set by Lou Kammerer in 1981.
'That's a record that needed to be broken for years,' said Hansen. 'He beat it by two tenths (of a second) which is pretty exciting for us. We have a national caliber sprinter which is something we can build on.'
The Badgers had only one other athlete competing on Thursday and that was junior Pat Torpey, who finished 38th in the 500-yard freestyle in 4:26.98.
'We've got seven men here but only two have NCAA experience,' explained Hansen. 'This is a big meet. The more experience you get, the better you respond at night (in the finals). Our guys with experience did respond tonight.'
The meet continues on Friday with preliminaries and finals in eight events. Preliminaries begin at 11 a.m. and finals at 7 p.m. in the Jamail Texas Swim Center on the University of Texas campus.
