Swimming and Diving: Trees pool hosts Big East Championships

This past weekend, Trees Pool was engulfed in the roars and cheers of spectators from across the… This past weekend, Trees Pool was engulfed in the roars and cheers of spectators from across the Northeast. It marked the first of two weekends devoted to the Big East Swimming and Diving Championships and featured the diving teams of 13 Big East schools.

After finals on Sunday, the Pitt men found themselves in second place with 72 points. They were sandwiched between Notre Dame’s impressive 129 points and West Virginia’s 46. Big East defending champ Louisville stalled into fourth place with 27 points.

All six of Notre Dame’s twelve divers scored in the 1-meter and 3-meter dives. Nicholas Nemetz, Notre Dame’s freshman superstar, took first place in both events. He also pulled in the silver in the exhibition platform dive on Sunday.

“We had to compete against a very strong Notre Dame team,” sophomore Aaron Snyder said. “We always knew they were a very deep team. They didn’t have just one strong diver, but they had several for both guys and girls.”

Snyder provided one of Pitt’s more dominant performances, taking second in the 1-meter dive and sixth in the 3-meter dives. He ended the weekend with 30 of Pitt’s 72 points. Teammate Erik Moore, finishing fifth in the 3-meter dive on Friday and sixth in the 1-meter dive Saturday, racked up another 27 points for the team.

“Both Aaron and Erik performed very well overall,” head dive coach Julian Krug said. “They both dove variably the past couple months but they both came through and were clutch, finaling in both boards. And of course Aaron had a second-place finish in the 1-meter.”

Moore went on to take fifth in the platform dive, while Snyder abstained due to a leg injury earlier in the season. The platform dive was added to the Big East championship meet just last year. So far, it’s only been an exhibition event and not scored for points.

The Panthers expect to be more competitive next year, since the Big East will score the event in the championship meet. Regardless of the conference in which Pitt participates, they’ll have to prepare more for the platform dive when they switch to the Atlantic Coast Conference — the ACC has already incorporated it into their program.

“We plan on training more intensively,” Snyder said. “The people who are doing platform this weekend only trained every once in a while when we knew there was a platform meet coming up.”

A surprise came from freshman Harris Bergman, who claimed third in the event on Sunday. This came after posting a personal best in the preliminaries of the 3-meter dive on Friday and then beating it in finals to earn fourth place in the event.

“Bergman really dove off phenomenally well for what he’s capable of doing,” Krug said. “In the 3-meter, he could have won the contest. He was fifty points or more better than his best score all year in that 3-meter event. And I would say the judging was tougher in this event than it was whenever he performed it before. Fifty points is a huge amount in diving, that’s almost unparalleled in my coaching here.”

By Sunday, the women had nudged their way into fifth place in the standings, falling behind Louisville (74), Notre Dame (71), Rutgers (52) and Connecticut (47). The next closest in the standings was backyard rival West Virginia, who finished with a mere 15 points.

Part of this was spearheaded by sophomore Leigh Waltz. Waltz raked in 18 points by finishing eighth in the women’s 1-meter dive Friday and second in the consolation finals of the 3-meter dive on Saturday.

“I did better than last year so I can’t be mad, but I would have liked to have done a little bit better in finals on 1-meter,” Waltz said. “I kind of bombed my first time. All-in-all, I had a good weekend and I just keep reminding myself that it could’ve been a lot worse. So I’m happy with how I did and I’m happy with how the team did.”

Other standouts include freshman Angelika McGhee, who picked up 12 points for her seventh-place finish in the 1-meter finals, and sophomore Kimberly Ciotti, who earned three points by picking up a sixth and an eighth place finish in the 1- and 3-meter consolation finals, respectively.

Along with the throngs of parents, students and swim fans crowded into the pool, several Pitt swimmers came out to root on their teammates and scope out their positioning for the swimming championship this coming weekend.

“[At] a lot of other schools, I’ve heard their diving team is completely separate and they don’t get along with their swimmers,” Waltz said. “When we were at finals, a bunch of the swimmers came to cheer us on. It makes you feel good and makes you feel like you’re one team.”

Waltz, whose roommate, Kate Dunseith, swims distance freestyle events on the team, expects that the divers will return the favor.

“I’ll be there all weekend,” she laughed.

Swimming action starts Wednesday at 6 p.m. with the 800-yard freestyle relay at Trees Pool. Starting Thursday and continuing until Sunday, preliminaries will begin at 10 a.m. and finals will start at 6 p.m.