Men's Swimming Moves Up to 11th at NCAAs
March 28, 2003 | Men's Swimming & Diving
Matt Marshall had a busy second day at the NCAA Championships for the University of Wisconsin men's swimming team. The junior from Chico, Calif., scored in two individual events and was a member of a relay to lead the Badgers into 11th place in the team standings.
'I knew it was going to be pretty busy,' said Marshall. 'It was the same thing at Big Tens. I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time between events but that's what you train for. You train for being able to finish races like that and know that you have to get through each race and try to score as many points for the team as you can.'
Marshall started the day swimming the butterfly leg of the 200-yard medley relay. He teamed with Adam Mania, Kevin Zakrzewski, and Dale Rogers to finish 11th in 1:28.45.
Marshall followed that up by swimming the second fastest time in Big Ten Conference history in the 100-yard butterfly to win the consolation final. He touched in 46.82 to shatter the UW record of 47.36 set by Brendan Coyne in 2001.It was the second time in one day that he broke the school record after swimming 47.20 in the preliminaries. Minnesota's Martin Zielinski holds the Big Ten record of 46.74.
'I've been trying to (break the UW record) all season,' said Marshall. 'It's been one of my goals all season. My goals for today were to one, try to get into the finals to score more points and two, to break Brendan's record. After I broke it this morning, I went into tonight 's 100 fly just trying to finish as high as I could to score more points because we're in a pretty tight race for 10th right now. To win consols and to go under 47 (seconds), was more than I could imagine.'
The school record was the second for Marshall in as many days. On Thursday, he set the UW mark in the 50-yard freestyle at 19.77, breaking a 22-year-old mark.
Less than 20 minutes after the 100 fly, Marshall was competing in the consolation final of the 100-yard backstroke where he finished 11th overall in 47.81. Mania finished 13th in the same race in 47.88.
The Badgers day wrapped up with another school record, this time it was in the 800-yard freestyle relay. The quartet of Eric Wiesner, Rogers, Pat Torpey and Matt Zuiderhof finished ninth in 6:28.37. They broke their own record of 6:28.75 set at the Texas Invitational earlier this season.
Rogers, Wiesner and Zuiderhof also competed in the 200-yard freestyle with Rogers finishing 21st (1:37.08), Wiesner 24th (1:37.44) and Zuiderhof 36th (1:38.44).
The championship wraps up on Saturday with preliminaries and finals in seven events. Preliminaries begin at 11 a.m. and finals at 7 p.m. at the Jamail Texas Swim Center on the University of Texas campus.
