The UW swim team played host to Laurier and the UOttawa GeeGees in a tri-team swim meet at the PAC, Nov. 24. Despite a strong showing, breaking four pool records, the Warriors fell second place to the GeeGees in the double dual meet format for both the men’s and the women’s.
The final team scores for the men were 165–91 GeeGees over the Warriors and 164–74 Warriors over the Hawks. For the women, GeeGees took the lead 151–102 over the Warriors and the Warriors beat the Hawks 160–66.
Graeme Kemp, in his fourth year with the Warriors, broke the pool record and won the 200-yard individual medley with a time of 1:53.97 — a Canadian Interuniversity Sport qualifying time. His success began in the men’s record-setting 4x50 medley relay with teammates Jon Ramkissoon, Logan Money, and Danyon Chu, with a final time of 1:36.82, winning over the CIS sixth-ranked GeeGees team of Sean Mclean, Connor Michie, Eric Alvarez, and Stephen Sun.
For the women, second-year Ola Jozwiak broke the pool record for the women’s 200-yard freestyle — previously held by Pamela Ruksys — with a time of 1:53.97, just shy of the 1:52.50 CIS qualifying time.
Jozwiak also led her teammates Tamara Shaw, Frances Heather, and Linda Wang in time for the women’s 400-yard freestyle relay that broke the previous 2012 pool record with a team time of 3:41.01, 11 seconds off of the CIS qualifying time.
Head coach Jeff Slater said that the preparation for the meet had been “really positive” and that the Waterloo team performed “quite well.”
“The team has been preparing by working on a bunch of their skills and thinking about just the process of getting better inside every session. They’ve been getting on tops of things and working on those little pieces every single time,” he said.
The Warriors also faced a meet the next two days at Laurier. “Our biggest meet of the season is [Nov. 22 and 23] and we’re using this meet as a little bit of preparation but the guys are great and they’ve trained very well and we’re excited for the weekend,” Slater said. In that meeting of Laurier, Laurentian, Queens, Brock, York, and Carleton, the Warriors’ men team took home the OUA Tihanyi Divisional swim title.
The Warriors will be finishing their fall term competition schedule at the Badger Invitational 2 in St. Catherine’s Nov. 29.
