INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana capped off the NCAA championships in historic fashion.
The Hoosiers finished seventh at the 2017 NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships after entering the final night of competition in fifth place. Still, it was their highest finish at the event as a program in 38 years.
“I wouldn’t trade anything that’s happened to us all year long,” IU head coach Ray Looze said. “If you’d have told me you can be top five but you can’t win Big Tens, I wouldn’t have traded seventh place for that because we needed to do that.”
IU placed seventh overall with a total of 229.5 points, the most for IU since scoring 274 in 1975. The top-10 finish for the Hoosiers at the NCAA Championships is the fifth in the last six years.
Indiana’s 400 freestyle relay team of Mohamed Samy, Blake Pieroni, Ali Khalafalla and Sam Lorentz finished eighth in the Championship Final with a time of 2:49.52, third-fastest in program history.
While the night was historic for Indiana, it was also memorable for the event itself. The competition resulted in 59 tournament records being shattered.
“It’s crazy how much faster this meet gets every year,” Pieroni said. “I thought last year, for sure, for sure this meet has to take a year off and kind of get a little slower. But it just got deeper and deeper, and even on the top end with how many American records were broken this week, it’s insane.”
Pieroni also placed eighth in the 100 freestyle with a time of 41.85, the best finish in that event since Jim Montgomery placed third in 1977.
“It was kind of a rollercoaster [of a week],” Pieroni said. “Had some pretty impressive swims and some not-so-impressive swims. Got a lot of stuff to work for and on for next year.”
In the Consolation Final of the platform dive, Cody Coldren earned Honorable Mention All-America honors – the first of his career – by placing seventh with a total of 311.35. The 15th place overall finish is the best for Coldren in his career.
“It awesome,” Coldren said. “Today went very well.”
Indiana divers concluded the week with 62 points along with All-America recognition for Michael Hixon and James Connor in the 1- and 3-meter dives respectively.
“It was a really good meet,” Coldren said. “It’s a long haul. It’s four days. It’s a marathon. It’s really tough. You’ve got to keep a really good attitude all four days. I feel like me and all of my teammates did a really good job of preserving through the marathon and a couple of hardships here and there, but we did a good job of preserving as a team.”
Entering the final night of competition, Indiana was fifth with 189.5 points, trailing North Carolina State by 4.5 points.
By the final event – the 400 free relay - it trailed Stanford by 6.5 points and was on the outside of the top five looking in at sixth. An eighth-place finish in relays bumped them back to seventh to conclude the event.
Still, it wound up being a historic day for the program. Now the goal is to build off it.
The result leaves “a bad taste in their mouths,” Looze said, but the staff and players are dedicated to getting the team into the top five.
“We’ll use that as fuel moving forward,” Looze said. “But I’m super proud of these guys. We rode them hard this week, and we just ran out of gas a bit. We’ll improve from it and we’ll make positive adjustments so we can finish even higher next year.”
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