At the conclusion of Saturday’s events, the Virginia women’s swimming and diving team could finally take a collective sigh of relief — it had accomplished its goal to become the best team in program history.
The Cavaliers earned 229 points at the women’s NCAA championship meet to earn a fifth place finish, besting the program’s previous top finish of seventh in 1988. California tallied 513 points to take the national title.
Virginia started the meet strong Thursday as sophomore Leah Smith’s preliminary time of 4:30.37 in the 500-yard freestyle broke the NCAA record. Smith won the event later that evening to become the program’s first national champion since 2001. Saturday, Smith earned her second individual national championship in the 1,650-yard freestyle. She also placed seventh in the 200-yard freestyle Friday.
Junior Courtney Bartholomew added two-second place finishes in the 100 and 200-yard backstroke, with the latter coming in an ACC record time of 1:49.35. In addition, she touched fifth in the 200-yard individual medley Thursday.
Sophomore Laura Simon earned multiple All-American honors after placing fourth in the 100-yard breaststroke Friday and second in the 200-yard event Saturday. Both times were program records.
Stanford out-touched Virginia’s 400-yard medley relay team by .01 seconds Thursday as the Cavaliers earned the second-place finish in a program record time of 3:36.42. The top-two times were the fastest in the history of the event.
For the first time since 2009, all five of Virginia relays finished in the top 16.
--compiled by Robert Elder
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