Swimming Dominates Blue Devils

The men won their meet 183-100 and the women won 164-123.

The women, who have never lost to the Blue Devils, made it 29 straight wins against their ACC rivals.

The men, who haven't lost since 1939, improved their record to 66-2.

But, not only did UNC win the meet, the men and women won every single event.

Even though the Tar Heels won handily, they treated the meet as a test run for the Nike Cup, which North Carolina will host Nov. 21-23.

"Everybody is looking forward to Nike Cup, so this was kind of a dress rehearsal," co-captain Janna Turner said. "We swam so well; I'm just so impressed with our team. Usually at this meet we don't swim as fast, but today people swam really well. A lot of people went best times."

Allison Herman won the 200-yard butterfly in a personal best time of 2:05.11, and Courtney Lewis did the same thing in the 1,000 freestyle in 10:20.21, just to name a few.

"We wanted to improve our depth, and we wanted to have a very good racing evening, and we did that superbly," UNC coach Frank Comfort said.

But swimming a personal record is not always easy after spending an entire day on campus.

"It's a Tuesday afternoon, you have to go to class all day, so just coming in here and racing, and mentally thinking you have a meet today when you have class all day is tough," Turner said. "Most of our meets aren't scheduled like this, so it's good to see how the girls react, and I think we all did really well. I mean, we're all tired. It's Tuesday."

The meet also gave the swimmers an opportunity to swim events different than their specialty to see if there were any hidden talents on the team.

"It's a chance to improve our depth in other events, and see if we have some potential in another event that we don't know about," said junior Casey Coble, who won the 200 butterfly and the 200 breaststroke. "It's a good meet to have at this time of the year."

The meet was also a time for freshmen to step up and show their talents.

On the women's side, Leila Martin won the 50 freestyle in a time of 24.34 seconds and placed second in the 500 free in 5:02.37.

Elizabeth Bruce won the 100 breaststroke in 1:04.28.

On the men's side, freshman Chad Ames won the 100 breaststroke in 59.3 seconds, the only time less than one minute.

But the performances were probably not enough to cause any major changes in the lineup.

"We had a couple of good swims, but I don't think it was anything to switch people's events around, but it was still really good," Coble said.

At the least, the UNC swimming and diving team continued its dominance against one squad this season.

As Turner said, "They might be able to beat us in basketball, but we got them in the pool."

The Sports Editor can be reached at sports@unc.edu.