Farris Breaks Another Ivy Record as Harvard Wins 3rd-Straight Title

IVY LEAGUE  – MEN

• Wednesday, February 27 – Saturday, March 2
• Katherine Moran Aquatics Center, Brown University, Rhode Island (Eastern Time Zone)
• Defending Champion: Harvard (2x)
• Live results
• Championship Central
• Complete Results (PDF)

Harvard junior Dean Farris finished his 3rd Ivy League Championship meet with another Meet Record, this time in the 100 free. Farir swam a 41.42, breaking the mark of Yale sprint legend Alex Righi, who was 41.91 at the 2009 championship.

It also took down Righi’s overall conference record of 41.71 that was set at the 2009 NCAA Championships.

Farris usually swims the 200 back on the final day of major championships. Last year at Ivies, he swam, and won, the 200 free, 100 back, and 200 back. At NCAAs, he swam the 50 free, 200 free, and 200 back. This 100 free is a deviation from what we’re used to from Farris on the last day of big meets.

In any case, that win was one of 2 for Harvard on the final day of competition. The Crimson won 12 events overall out of 21 on offer at the meet, and rolled to their 3rd-straight, and 26th-overall, Ivy League title.

The other Harvard win on the day was Brennan Novak, who won his 2nd-straight 1650 free with a 14:46.60 – out-pacing the field by better than 8 seconds and also locking up his NCAA National Championship invite as an individual. Runner-up Will Thomas of Penn finished 2nd in 14:54.76, which puts him on the bubble for an invite of his own.

Novak (500/1000/1650 freestyles) and Farris (200 free/100 back/100 free) both won all 3 of their individual events at the meet, which meant a tie for the Phil Moriarty High Point Swimmer of the Meet award. The two tied with a maximum 96 points last year as well.

Penn senior Mark Andrew wrapped his Ivy League Championship career on Saturday as well with a win in the 200 breaststroke in 1:54.38. After Cornell’s Alex Evdokimov won the event in each of the last 4 years, that’s Andrew’s first title in that race and the 8th of his career. He ended his career with 351 points, exactly the same as Novak, and the two shared the Harold Ulen Career High Point Swimmer award for a graduating senior who scored the most Ivy League Championship points over a 4-year collegiate campaign. Novak won 7 Ivy League titles individually in his career.

Other Day 4 Winners:

• Princeton senior Cole Buese won the men’s 200 backstroke in 1:43.35. He was in a dead heat with Harvard’s Daniel Tran (1:44.32) and Brown’s Coley Sullivan (1:44.54) going into the final 50, but a closing split of 27.26 allowed him to win the race by almost a second. Farris won this race last year, and in his absence, Buese shifted from the 200 fly to the 200 back and won his first (and last) career Ivy League title as an individual.
• Princeton freshman Raunak Khosla grabbed his 2nd individual event win of the meet, topping the men’s 200 fly in a new Ivy League Record of 1:42.05. The old conference and meet record of 1:42.35 was set by Brown’s Tommy Glenn in 2014 at the Ivy League Championships.
• Columbia sophomore Jonathan Suckow broke the Brown University Pool Record in the men’s 3-meter final, winning with a score of 442.35. That gives him a sweep of the springboard events at the meet, and earned him the Karl B. Michael High Point Diver of the Meet award. This is his 2nd-straight springboard sweep (the Ivy League doesn’t dive platform) and makes Columbia undefeated in Ivy League diving over the last 4 seasons.
• Even with only finishing 18th on the 1-meter and 24th on the 3-meter, Dartmouth senior AJ Krok won the Ron Keenhold Career High Point Diver award with 105.5 points over 4 years. This year’s crop of Ivy League divers is very young – out of 24 entrants, only 4 are seniors.
• Penn may have slipped behind Princeton for 2nd-place at meet’s end, but they did get the last laugh when they won the men’s 400 free relay in 1:52.26. That put them about half-a-second ahead of the Dean-Farris-less Harvard relay that was 2nd in 2:52.71. The winning Penn quartet was comprised of Thomas Dillinger (43.19), Mark Andrew (42.53), Sean Lee (43.48), and Mark Blinstrub (43.06). Lee is a sophomore, but the other 3 swimmers are all seniors. The fastest split of the field went to Yale anchor Henry Gaissert, who split 42.01 on the Bulldogs’ 3rd-place relay. That wasn’t quite enough though for Yale to catch Columbia for 4th place. Yale was 3rd in that relay by .08 seconds behind Harvard, and those 2 points would’ve been enough for Yale to jump a spot in the final team standings.

Final Team Standings

1. Harvard – 1432.5
2. Princeton – 1209.5
3. Penn – 1120.5
4. Columbia – 1037
5. Yale – 1035.5
6. Brown – 884
7. Cornell – 701.5
8. Dartmouth – 425.5