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The Miners receive their second place trophy at the NCAA Championships |
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- During each day of the NCAA Division II Championships, the Missouri S&T swimming team kept moving up in the team standings, from sixth to fifth and then fourth heading into the final day.
On Saturday, the Miners jumped two more spots in the team standings to land the highest finish ever for a Miner athletic team at a national competition, as Missouri S&T took second place at the meet that concluded Saturday night.
S&T finished with 336 points in the meet, beating out third place West Chester by nearly 20 points to finish one spot higher than the previous best which came in 1998. Drury won the team competition with 523.5 points.
"We knew going in that our best days were going to be in the back half of the meet," said Miner head coach Doug Grooms. "We just had to stay patient. We were swimming extremely well and just had to stay with it.
"Our team went from sixth to fifth to fourth and we knew our last day was our strongest," Grooms added. "After we started out with two of the nine fastest swims in the 50-freestyle, the kids just fed off each other and followed suit."
The Miners' performance at the national meet helped earn Grooms the national coach of the year award from the College Swimming Coaches Association of America.
The Miners got a second place finish from freshman Zlatan Hamzic in the 200-yard breaststroke with a school record time of 1:58.55, as he finished second to Seattle's Jakub Jiracek who won his NCAA Division II record 11th national championship.
S&T also got fifth place finishes Saturday from Matt Hug in the 1,650-yard freestyle in 15:38.92 and David Sanchez-Turner in the 100-yard freestyle in 44.90 seconds, while getting a sixth from Jeff Enge in the 200-yard backstroke.
Enge, Kyle Kammer and Aaron Schmidt, who set the school record in the 200-backstroke at 1:49.54 in the preliminaries, all finished among the top eight in the event with time under 1:50; no Miner had cleared that mark prior to Saturday.
Kammer was seventh in the finals in 1:49.72 and Schmidt eighth in 1:49.93.
Andrew Trowbridge also landed All-America honors in the 1,650-freestyle with his mark of 15:45.39, while David Calcara also had a seventh place finish in the 200-breaststroke with a time of 2:04.31 and Kyle Gordon also scored in the consolation finals of the 100-freestyle.
The Miners' 400-yard freestyle relay team of Gordon, Mark Chamberlain, Hug and Sanchez-Turner took eighth place with a time of 3:03.90 after it went 3:02.30.
In all, the MIners set nine school records during the course of the national meet held at the Mizzou Aquatics Center and earned 40 All-America awards, including 33 finishes among the top eight.