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Men's Swimming/Diving Ready To Race For 19th EISL Championship In Home Pool
February 22, 2007 | Men's Swimming and Diving
The recent championship trend says that this is Harvard's year. The regular season says that it is Cornell's year. But as eight other EISL men's swimming and diving teams converge on DeNunzio Pool for Thursday's first session of the 2007 championship meet, the home team feels good about its own chances. The 2007 Princeton squad is the defending league champion, swims its best at home and surged to a strong finish this season. With three more good days, these Tigers will join the women's team atop the Ivy League once again.
Similar to the women's competition, the 2007 EISL championships will be broken up into six sessions over three days, and all will be available over the internet if you sign up with the Tiger Zone, available on the front page of www.GoPrincetonTigers.com. The preliminaries will be held in the three morning sessions, each of which will start at 11 a.m. The finals for all nights will begin at 6 p.m. Full coverage of the event, including scheduled events for each session, can be found by clicking on the link above.
Princeton and Harvard have rotated championships each of the last six seasons, with the Tigers winning each even year. Princeton's last title came in 2006, when it went to Cambridge and upset the regular-season champion Crimson. The Orange and Black pulled off its title without winning a single individual event last year; instead, it was the overall depth that won the meet. Where first-place finishes were lacking, the abundance of finalists, including several second- and third-place finishes, were enough to overcome Harvard, Columbia and Cornell.
This field could be one of the deepest in years. While Harvard and Princeton are annual contenders, it was Cornell that went undefeated during the regular season and carries a handful of experienced competitors who have won EISL titles. Navy handed Princeton a loss during the regular season, and Columbia had another strong season coming off last year's third-place finish.
The Tigers will rely on some of their most talented swimmers, including Robert Griest, Meir Hasbani and Doug Lennox, and a strong corps of divers, including veteran Stuart Malcolm. But that depth will need to be there again, meaning Princeton will have to perform as well or better than anybody in the preliminaries to make sure it puts a large quantity of competitors in the finals.
GoPrincetonTigers.com will have nightly recaps following each finals session.