March 23, 2004
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NCAA Qualifiers Meet-by-Meet PerformancesDownload Free Acrobat Reader
This Week
The Sun Devils are sending six men to the NCAA Men's Swimming and Diving Championships March 25-27 in East Meadow, N.Y. Senior All-Americans Nick Brunelli and Ahmed Hussein and sophomore All-Americans David Kolozar and Joona Puhakka return to the national championships while juniors Jeff Barrett and Emerson Ward are making their first trip. ASU is qualified in the 50 free (Brunelli), 200 free (Brunelli, Barrett), 100 breast (Ward), 100 back (Hussein), 200 back (Hussein), 100 free (Brunelli, Barrett), 200 fly (Kolozar) and all three diving events (Puhakka). The entire men's official psyche sheet can be viewed on the web by clicking here .
The Polls
In the final dual meet poll released by the CSCAA for the 2003-04 season, the ASU men are ranked 15th while the women are ranked 22nd. For the complete poll, visit www.cscaa.org.
Men, Last Time In The Pool
The Arizona State men's swimming team finished the 2004 Pac-10 Championships in 5th place with 407 points after competition at the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool in Long Beach, Calif., March 3-6. Senior All-American Nick Brunelli led the team during his final conference championship, turning in great performances all week, highlighted by winning the Pac-10 title in the 200 freestyle. Brunelli's time of 1:35.26 is a career-best and is the men's first conference swimming title since 2000. Brunelli placed second in the 100 freestyle, touching the wall in 43.12 to notch his fastest time of the year and also placed fourth in the 50 freestyle (19.71). In the 100 backstroke senior All-American Ahmed Hussein placed fifth with a time of 48.03 and he finished seventh in the 200 backstroke with a time of 1:46.38. Sophomore All-American David Kolozar earned a fourth-place finish in the 200 butterfly with a season-best time of 1:45.75 while junior Emerson Ward placed eighth in the 100 breaststroke (54.92) after clocking a 54.58 in the prelims to record the second-fastest time in ASU history. Diver Joona Puhakka comes into the NCAAs after winning both the 1m and 3m springboard events at the Zone E Diving Regionals March 11-13.
Women Finish 14th At NCAAs
The Sun Devils women finished in 14th place with 107 points to finish in the nation's top-15 for the third year in a row at the NCAA Championships March 18-20 in College Station, Texas. Junior diver Trisha Tumlinson earned the Sun Devils' highest finish with second-place performance on the platform. Tumlinson totaled 454.35 points to earn the highest finish of her NCAA career. Junior ?gnes Kov?cs earned three individual first-team All-American honors with a fifth place showing in the 200m breaststroke (2:26.29), a sixth place in the 100m breaststroke (1:07.37) and a sixth place in the 200m IM (2:12.73). Junior Florencia Szigeti led off the 400m freestyle relay on the final day with a time of 55.34 in the opening leg which converts to a short course yards time of 49.58 and rewrites her own school record in the 100 freestyle. That came a day after she clocked a converted 1:46.15 in the 200 freestyle to better her own record set at the Pac-10s in February. In the 800m freestyle relay, the Sun Devils turned in a stunning performance and finished eighth, earning the foursome first-team All-American honors. Senior Petra Banovic, Szigeti, Kov?cs and freshman Amanda Gillespie utterly destroyed the previous school record as they turned in a time of 8:00.69. The time in a short course yards equivalent figures to 7:10.69, bettering the previous mark that had stood since 1988 by almost seven seconds.