A slow start on Thursday at the South Carolina Gamecock Invitational may have set Florida’s men back in their quest to challenge some of the top competitors in collegiate swimming.
UF’s team was divided for two invitationals: A part of the team traveled to the Georgia Tech Invitational, and the remainder, some of the less-proven athletes, traveled to South Carolina. The Gators faced tough competition on the first day and were unable to get any sort of consistency in the early events.
The meet’s participants included the College of Charleston, Duke, East Carolina, Florida, Georgia Southern, James Madison, North Carolina, Old Dominion and host South Carolina.
After completing day-one preliminary rounds earlier that afternoon, UF began day-one finals Thursday evening with a seventh-place finish in the 200-yard freestyle relay, putting the team fifth (30 points) in the overall standings behind leader North Carolina (84 points).
The Gators followed that performance with redshirt freshman Csaba Gerscak finishing eighth in the 500 free.
In the team’s third event of the night, UF began to climb up the leaderboard. Three Gators finished in the top five of the 200 individual medley: Junior Bobby Walsh took second, sophomore Brian Howell took fourth and junior Alex Martin finished fifth.
Another redshirt freshman, Rodion Davelaar, took sixth in the 50 free.
When it was time for the final event of the evening, the 400 medley relay, UF had moved up to fourth place in the overall standings.
On the women’s side, UF had an even slower start to the invitational.
The women finished 13th in the 200 free relay and stood at a distant seventh (8 points) behind the leader, North Carolina (80 points).
The evening didn’t improve much for UF.
In the second event for the women, freshman Sharla Milne took 10th in the 500 free, and freshman Kaitlin Taylor finished 10th in the next event, the 200 individual medley.
Senior Coral Lopez finished 16th in the 50 free.
After five events, UF’s women stood in seventh overall with 42 points, while North Carolina had 357 points in the lead.
The teams will continue competition today with day-two preliminaries at 10 a.m.
Florida coach Gregg Troy was unavailable for comment for this story.
