NEW HAVEN, Conn. - One school record fell and another was approached as the Saint Michael's College men's and women's swimming & diving squads completed an abbreviated day one of the four-day Northeast-10 Conference Championship on Thursday at Southern Connecticut State University's Hutchison Natatorium. The Purple Knight men are fifth out of seven schools with 83 points, while the women stand ninth of nine with 35 points, just five shy of Merrimack College. Day two begins on Friday with trials at 10 a.m.
Senior Nick Youmans (Mountainside, N.J./Governor Livingston) qualified for the finals of the one-meter diving event in his first league championship before placing sixth, with 307.00 points. He improved 23.15 points on his trials score, the largest addition by any of the 16 men or women in the 1M event. Youmans became the first Purple Knight diver to break the 300-point barrier since the 2010 New England Intercollegiate Swimming & Diving Association (NEISDA) Championship. First-year Genevieve Gigandet (Groveland, Mass./Central Catholic) had 290.65 points in the prelims, missing the finals by 2.5 points.
Saint Michael's had a pair of men's relay foursomes place seventh, with senior Nathan Paluso (Windham, Maine/Windham), sophomores Ryan Butler (Waltham, Mass./Waltham) and Cam Thirkell (Tyngsboro, Mass./Tyngsboro), and first-year Pierce Farrington (Shelburne, Vt./Champlain Valley Union) swimming legs for both. During the 200-yard medley relay, the foursome clocked in at 1:41.60, coming within 0.37 seconds of a six-year-old school record. Farrington led off with a 50-yard backstroke time of 24.02, besting his own two-week-old school record by 0.84 seconds. The foursome finished the 800-yard freestyle relay in 7:35.83.
On the women's side, senior Kim Brady (Morris Township, N.J./Academy of Saint Elizabeth), sophomores Lindsay McNall (Colchester, Vt./Colchester) and Katrina Wiesner (Bow, N.H./Bow), and first-year Sammy Sidorakis (Baldwinsville, N.Y./C.W. Baker) were eighth in the 800 free relay at 8:19.76. The Purple Knights' top 200 medley relay foursome was disqualified.
