In its first championship style meet of the season, the ASU swim and dive teams came away with mixed results.
“It went very good for the guys and not so good for the girls,” ASU dive coach Mark Bradshaw said.
ASU sophomore Riley McCormick and junior Constantin Blaha finished first and second in both the 1-meter and 3-meter dives for the men’s team at the Wildcat Invitational.
McCormick won the 1-meter with a score of 389.50, while Blaha won the 3-meter with a 405.85.
“I am really happy with how I did,” McCormick said. “[The meet] went really well, especially with Constantin and I finishing first and second on both boards.”
Junior Cameron Bradshaw finished sixth in the 3-meter, rounding out the solid weekend for the men.
“They dove really well, all three of them,” Bradshaw said of the men.
The meet was also a good measuring stick for ASU because of who they were competing against.
“Almost everyone from our zone and [the] Pac-10 was there,” McCormick said. “We are in a really good spot right now.”
While the men were impressive over the weekend, the women ran into some trouble.
“The girls really struggled both days,” Mark Bradshaw said.
There was an unusually high amount of women in the competition, but Bradshaw did not feel that the amount of divers were the cause of his team’s struggles.
“Their counterparts [were] all [diving] under the same circumstances,” Bradshaw said.
The excess of divers meant the ASU women had to wait longer in between each dive, but Bradshaw had hoped his women would have done a better job adjusting to the situation.
Although it was the first time this season that the dive team had competed in a meet of this format, the struggles caught ASU by surprise.
“Leading up to this weekend we had been diving better [than previous weeks],” Bradshaw said.
While the dive team was in Tucson, Ariz., the swim team was putting together an impressive performance in Long Beach, Calif., at the Arena Invitational.
The women finished in third place while the men finished in eighth. Stanford won both the men’s and the women’s meets.
ASU junior Rebecca Ejdervik made the most of the trip to California as she helped to set two meet records.
Ejdervik set the meet record in the 100-yard breaststroke with a time of 1:00.04, which had been standing for seven years.
Another meet record was set when the ASU women finished the 200-yard medley relay in 1:38.93. The relay team, which consisted of Ejdervik, junior Kelli Kyle, sophomore Caroline Kuczynski, and senior Katie Haron, edged out No. 1 Stanford by less than a second.
Freshman Tristin Baxter also had an impressive weekend, finishing second in the 1,650-yard freestyle with a time of 16:14.39.
The men were not as successful as the women, but were able to place fifth in the 800 free relay with a time of 6:47.79.
ASU will fill the next few weeks with practices as they do not compete for over a month. The women’s swim team does not have a meet until Dec. 18 and the dive team is off until Jan. 7.
Reach the reporter at william.boor@asu.edu
