Stultz, Plutecki compete in NCAA Championships

Pitt men’s swimming and diving sent two athletes, school record holders Jeremy Stultz and… Pitt men’s swimming and diving sent two athletes, school record holders Jeremy Stultz and Adam Plutecki, to the NCAA Championships last weekend, with one bringing home All-America honors.

Stultz, a junior, seized the opportunity, twisting and turning his way to two top-20 finishes overall. A seventh-place medal in the 3-meter dive earned him All-America status.

After gaining national championship eligibility at the Zone A championships held the first weekend of March, Stultz hoped to make the top 16 in the events.

“I set goals in the beginning of the year,” Stultz said. “I just wanted to have a good meet.”

On the first day of competition, Stultz just missed qualifying for finals with a 303.95 finish in the 1-meter dive. He placed 17th in the round.

The next morning, his preliminary dives in the 3-meter wrapped up a score of 362.1, moving him into eighth place for finals that night.

“I hit my last dive going into finals, so I felt pretty good,” Stultz said, adding that only one of his six dives in the preliminaries was “so-so.”

His 383.85 earned a seventh-place finish. Auburn’s Steven Segerlin captured the top spot in the event, scoring 401.5 in the preliminaries and 415.8 in the finals.

John Soulakis was the last Pitt diver to become an All-American, doing so in 1997 in the 3-meter and platform dive events.

Plutecki, the lone Pitt swimmer, met more difficulty in taking on top national competitors.

He was seeded 15th in the 100-meter breaststroke and 13th in the 200-meter breaststroke going into the championship weekend.

On his first day of competition, Plutecki approached the 100-meter breaststroke with a school-record time of 53.81 already to his name.

Adding almost a full second to his previous time under the national pressure, Plutecki turned out a 54.67 for a 32nd-place finish in the event. Mike Alexandrov from Northwestern University won the 100-meter breaststroke with a time of 51.56, a new NCAA record.

On the next day, Plutecki’s signature race, the 200-meter breaststroke, gave him even more trouble than the day before.

He disqualified in the preliminaries, along with two other swimmers, because of a one-handed touch, barring him from further competition for the day. Every time a swimmer turns at the wall to begin a new lap in a breaststroke race, he must touch the wall with two hands at the same time, or he will face disqualification.

“We expected better of Adam at the national championships,” Pitt head swimming coach Chuck Knoles said. “I was just glad to have him complete the season and give him the experience.”

Up until last weekend, Plutecki had not competed since the first week of February and missed a valuable opportunity to prepare for the national competition.

He failed to attend the Big East Championships, Minneapolis’ warm-up act for Pitt, in February because of sickness and a failure to comply with NCAA eligibility rules.

Plutecki, a sophomore from Poland, has only swum one semester under Knoles’ guidance.

The 2007 NCAA Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships were held in Minneapolis, Minn., last Thursday, Friday and Saturday and concluded the season for the team.