New Contenders Rise on the Leaderboard
While the usual suspects surpass expectations early on, we take note of some of the other competitors with attention-grabbing early season times.
There are the athletes we always talk about - and we will continue to do so - but we are also seeing some new faces worth noting.1 Here’s a meet-and-greet for some swimmers we expect to spend more time with as the season develops.
We will probably do more of these as the season goes on, because while we have, in the past, made reference to Alesha Kelly, Penny Celtnieks, Jada Chatoor, Alex McCormick, Larry Yu, Alex Turvey, and others, we have not discussed them in proportion to the impact they are currently having on the division. We’re going to need to come back to this.
In the meantime, here are those new faces:
DJ Lloyd, CMU
Carnegie Mellon Sophomore DJ Lloyd spent most of last season sitting 21-low or 20-high in 50 Free. Right now he leads Division III with a 20.28, and he looks dangerous. Or maybe just focused.
Ella McEver, Chicago
Coming over from England, I guess Ella McEver didn’t get much chance to swim 400 Yard IM because…they wouldn’t know what a yard is. I assume Ms. McEver was pleased to discover that with SCY, you get to use the wall a lot more. Anyway, the second time - in her life - that she swam a 400 IM SCY she swam it in a time of 4:23.19.
What…is…going on? Forget B Cuts (which in this case is a 4:29.67). Her time of 4:23.19 would have put her in the seventh position on the first 2023 Nationals psych sheet. All of last year only six athletes in all of Division III swam the event faster than Ms. McEver did last weekend…the second time in her life that she swam a SCY 400 IM.
By the way, she came in second in the race because Neely Burns was also at that meet.
Bengisu Caymaz, Kenyon
Adorably nicknamed ‘Benji’ because no one seems to know how to pronounce her name, this Kenyon 1st-year promises to nicely complement the Kenyon ladies distance game. Kenyon’s Molly Haag (Sophomore) and Sarah Hoffman (Senior) posted some terrific distance swims towards the end of last season, but when it comes to distance freestyle, the problem for Kenyon’s Women is Denison (that’s kind of everybody’s problem, not just Kenyon’s). Looking ahead to conferences and Nationals, Kenyon needs to fill up both A and B Finals in those freestyle events if they hope to keep pace with the Big Red, and Ms. Caymaz looks prepared for that challenge.
On Friday night, Ms. Caymaz swam a division leading 1000 Free in 10:12.44, with an extracted 500 Free of 4:58.13, which raised some eyebrows among the Kenyon faithful. The next morning she swam 500 Free in 4:57.51, good enough for 3rd place in the division behind only Kristin Cornish and Eagle of the Week Penelope Helm.
To keep with the theme, that 500 Free time was her first recorded swim of a 500 Free in a short-course yards event.
Basically if you have been named, even in passing, in a previous post, then we are going to move on to someone we have so far completely ignored. So many fast swimmers right now.