12 I Tuesday Dec. 7, 2010
Men’s swimming shows
By James Nlcol
COLLEGIAN STAFF WRITER
Penn State swimmers set sev
eral season-best and career-best
times in the Georgia Invitational, a
three-day meet in
Athens, Ga., this
past weekend.
, ..ul,
1-
Penn State fin
ished in fifth place
out of the five
teams competing
at the meet. No.'
Auburn won the
meet, followed by " ar ® s
Georgia,
Minnesota and Virginia, all of
which are ranked in the top 15 by
the College Swimming Coaches
Association of America.
Despite the team’s fifth place
Women’s soccer’s
By Andrew Robinson
COLLEGIAN STAFF WRITER
Erica Walsh, the coach, Megan Monroig, the emotional
senior captain, and Christine Naim, the star midfielder, all
agreed on one word to describe the Penn State women’s
soccer team’s 2010 season.
Bittersweet.
“We had a ton of youth and now that I’m sitting and
doing player meetings and I see the lessons the young
players learned, I’m thankful for those opportunities and
thankful that we went through that together,” Walsh said.
That’s tough when you’re dealing with special players
like Megan Monroig and Dani Toney, knowing that was
their senior year and they had to go through some of those
challenges ”
A look at the end result, a second-round exit in the
NCAA tournament and the record-setting 13th straight
Big Ten title, and it shows a team that achieved a degree
of success this year.
But go back to Sept. 20 and this same team was 2-6-1,
with uncharacteristic losses to Yale, William & Mary and
Dartmouth and the continuation of any kind of streak
looking bleak.
But instead of calling it quits, the Nittany Lions kept
fighting and benefited from the right amount of luck,
allowing them to celebrate in Walsh’s basement when
Penn State’s name appeared in the NCAA bracket.
A year after losing seven impact seniors, Walsh antici
pated her young team struggling at times in 2010.
But the coach was also fair in her assessment, saying
she felt the team underachieved during the beginning of
the vear.
At the same time, the Lions were playing their best soc
cer over the season’s last month and the pieces started
coming together.
That surge, and the fact the team outplayed West
Virginia for the last 70 minutes of its 2-1 loss in the second
round of the tournament, made the loss that much worse
for the Lions.
"We did want to go to the College Cup, us 25 players
believed in our team and what we had and despite going 2-
0-1 in our first [nine] games, we still believe we could have
made it,” Monroig said.
"That's good to have throughout the entire season,
regardless of how your season’s going and we did keep that
hope and dream alive. It just says a lot about our charac
ter.”
Penn State’s year began on the same field it ended on,
with a 2-1 overtime win against West Virginia on Aug. 20.
After that, the then-No. 12 Lions returned to University-
Park for an emotional game against then-No. 15 Virginia,
the team that knocked them out of the NCAAs a year
before in an unexpected 6-2 loss.
Alter freshman forward Hayley Brock scored in the
home opener, the Lions looked on their way to a win before
Virginia tied the game with a little more than three min
utes left. The teams ended up tying, 1-1, and the Lions then
went on a five-game losing streak that tested the makeup
of the team.
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finish, coach John Hargis was
impressed with the performance
of many individual swimmers.
“I think we did pretty well,”
Hargis said.
“We did better as the meet went
on, I think each day we did a little
bit better and competed pretty
well.”
The best finish of any of the
Penn State swimmers was the
third-place finishes of the 200-
medley team and freshman Matt
Salig in the 200 butterfly.
Penn State’s 200-medley team
of Luke Bushman, Mitch Scherer.
Sean Grier and Brian Alden com
bined to post a time of 1:28.99. The
time was good enough to make the
NCAA’s “B” cut-off time put
ting the group among the best
swimmers in the country and
SPORTS
was a season-best time for Penn
State.
Alden was impressed with how
the team swam at the tourna
ment.
"I think everybody for the most
part had a great meet,” Alden
said. "We had a lot of people swim
to their potential.”
In the 200-freestyle relay, Alden,
Grier. Shane Austin and John
Austin recorded the team’s fastest
time of the season with a 1:21.99.
The result earned them a sixth
place finish and was only .42 sec
onds from the “B” cut-off.
Alden. Penn State's lone NCAA
qualifier from last year, finished
fourth in the 200 freestyle and
made the “B" cut with his time of
1:37.49. In the 50 freestyle, Alden’s
qualifying time of 20.30 was good
“bittersweet” season teaches lessons
Senior Dani Toney (left) pushes the ball upfield. Toney and Megan Monroig are the team’s lone graduating seniors.
"There were two parts to that time period,” Walsh said.
“The first part w as. We re good enough, we’ll get through
it,' and the second was. We re going to have to really work
to get through it.' And when the team transitioned into that
second part, then my confidence started to grow, but we
had to hit that bottom piece first."
While Walsh wishes her team had never been in that
spot, she said she was proud of how her players respond
ed. As much as it showed in the team’s record an 8-2 run
through the Big Ten it showed in practice, as well.
The Lions have a philosophy of playing for each other,
and every day. each player would take a shirt adorned with
a teammate's number and wear it through training that
day, then repeat the process the next day. Next season, the
Lions return all of their main contributors, except seniors'
Monroig and Toney
With so many key players returning, and with a year of
experience to build on, Nairn said the next step is advanc
ing past the second round. For Penn State, that work starts
in the spring season and the sophomore said she and her
teammates are ready to get back to work.
* T t - '**
improvement in Georgia
enough for a “B” time, but his time
of 20.54 in the finals earned him
12th place.
Scott Marino swam the fastest
time in the 200 IM preliminaries
but came away with a fourth-place
finish in the finals with a time of
1:47.94.
“That was a great morning for
him,” Hargis said.
“He went a little bit slower at
night but stiff did very well and, for
him, swimming that fast right now
was good to see.”
In the 400 IM, Bushman bested
his career-best time, 3:58.18, at the
2010 Big Ten Championships, by
almost four seconds. His time of
3:54.75 gave him a sixth-place fin
ish.
Bushman attributed the
improvement to coaching and the
%*>***+
V?:*. .;'s.: : V‘. r '
“This season was kind of a building year” Nairn said. “It
made us take steps in the right direction for us to be even
more successful this spring and fall."
Walsh's coaching philosophy is built on a tough noncon
ference slate that not only tests her teams, but gets them
in the right form come Big Ten season. After four years,
Walsh owns a 58-27-5 record at Penn State with a 33-6-1
mark in the Big Ten. The coach said in order for her team
to have the impact it wants to have in November on the
national scale, it has to face adversity early on and if that
means taking one or two early losses, so be it.
Though the team has had some trouble in that early
stretch the last two seasons, Walsh did stop to think when
asked if she has considered easing the team into the more
challenging nonconference games with a couple easier
ones to start.
“Yeah, we’ve decided to scale back a little bit, we decid
ed to start next year at [2OlO national runner up] Stanford,”
Walsh said with a laugh. “That’s our scaling back.”
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talented young swimmers on the
team.
“Last year was a big change for
me, it was a hard year and a rough
year and a lot of that work has now
paid off,” Bushman said. “We’ve
been working real hard and we
have a lot of great freshmen and
they’ve been pushing me in prac
tice.”
Alden, Marino, Bushman and
freshman standout Shane Austin
set a season-best time of 6:38.50 in
the 800-freestyle relay and fin
ished in sixth place.
“This time of year the kids are
really excited,” Hargis said. “They
were racing in a very good compe
tition, they just got very excited
and did very well.”
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