Galo Pesantes
Sports Editor
In their first home swim and dive meet of the year, both La Verne teams won convincingly over Caltech on Saturday.
The men’s team beat the Beavers with a final tally of 120-88, while the women’s team also finished victorious, 149-69.
In the diving events, both teams had first place winners in the one- and three-meter events.
La Verne freshman Amanda McCadden won both events with scores of 156.85 and 186.55.
Junior Chad Loury also won both of his events on the men’s side with final results of 207.25 and 194.10.
“I felt like I dove pretty well,” Loury said. “Our whole team did very well today.”
In the other 22 events, La Verne swimmers dominated Caltech for the most of the meet.
With the exception of the men’s 200-yard medley, where ULV was narrowly defeated by the Beavers by a winning time of 1:53.01.
The Leopards finished the event with a time of 1:54.92.
The ULV team was headed by seniors Duncan Cox, Matthew Nasont, Anthony Hernandez and junior Johannes Geist, who were unable to come back to win in the final 50 yards of the race.
However several individual competitors for La Verne would rebound after the medley loss, with sophomore Julian Czerwiec finishing first and Hernandez finishing in second place in the men’s 200-yard freestyle.
Czerwiec would also add another win later with a final time of 1:04.22, beating out Nasont in the mixed 100-yard backstroke.
Geist participated in three events and won the mixed 1,000-yard freestyle with a final time of 11:49.92.
“I was coming off a tough day yesterday but I did pretty good overall, I think,” Geist said. “Individually I just want to keep on improving my splits and utilize my kicks more.”
On the women’s side, freshman Tiffany Martin and sophomore Mahina Reyes would lead the way for La Verne.
Martin finished with wins in the 200-yard freestyle, mixed 100-yard butterfly and the 100-yard breaststroke.
She also fell just two seconds short of breaking the ULV school record for the 100-yard butterfly.
“It was a decent swim for the conditions,” Martin said. “Overall I did alright, but I got through it, so it was good.”
Meanwhile Reyes’ strong showings were good enough for the top spot in the 100-yard freestyle and the 50-yard freestyle.
At the end of the meet, the ULV women’s 200-yard freestyle relay team was able to avenge the men’s previous loss in their medley earlier in the day.
Led by senior Jennifer Briggs, along with junior Lindsay Jones and sophomores Patty Allen and Megan Moore, the Leopards came away with a victory over Caltech of more than 13 seconds in the final event of the meet.
The meet against Caltech was the first of five home meets for the La Verne swimming and diving teams this season.
The teams will host the Leo Invitational tomorrow at 10 a.m. in the La Verne Aquatic Center.
Following the Leo Invitational, La Verne will travel to Las Vegas for the Vegas Winter Invitational on Dec. 15-16.
Galo Pesantes can be reached at gpesantes@ulv.edu.
Journalism operations manager at the University of La Verne. Production manager and business manager of the Campus Times.
