The past few weekends have been quite successful for the Brandeis University men and women’s swimming & diving teams, who traveled to the University of Chicago for the UAA Championships the weekend of Feb. 15-16, and then competed in the NEISDA Championship this past weekend at MIT. Overall, the Judges set 11 school records in all of the events.
During the Judges’ first day at Chicago, they set four records. Both Daniel Wohl ’21 and Tamir Zitelny ’20 advanced to the final sessions of the day after achieving record times in their first events. Over on the relays side, the freestyle relay team of Wohl ’21, Marcelo Ohno-Machado ’21 and Chase Chen ’21 beat their previous record from earlier this year with a time of 1:25.03 to place seventh overall. For the women, a team of all first-years—Claire Xu ’22, Olivia Stebbins ‘22, Gazelle Umbay ’22 and Lauren Howard ’22, who competed in the 400-yard medley relay—placed eighth, while breaking the school’s record by .75 seconds with a time of 4:01.50. The men’s foursome of Zitelny, Brendan Lu ’22, Matthew Arcemont ’21 and Wohl finished in 3:27.52, another record time which placed them sixth in the 400 medley relay event.
Zitelny shined on Thursday after setting three school records in the 100-yard backstroke, 100-yard butterfly, and the 50-yard backstroke as well as scoring his first BCAA qualifying time this season. Joining Zitelny in moving onto the finals were Wohl in the 200-yard freestyle, Richard Selznick ’21 in the 400-yard medley, and Alex Wang ’22 in the 100-yard breaststroke. The women sent first-year Claire Xu ’22 to the finals, who finished in 19th place in the 100-yard backstroke event. To finish the UAA Championships, the men finished in second place and the women placed third.
Following their successful performances in Chicago, the Judges had three top finishers on day two of the New England intercollegiate Swimming and Diving Association, after the men finished in second place and the women finished third after Day 1. BUSDT completed their season during day three with four new school records, a meet record and four wins overall to place the men second and the women third.
