Men’s Swimming and Diving Team Places 13th at Nationals

Heading into the Collegiate Club Swimming and Diving National Championships, the Liberty Flames men’s swimming and diving team had endured an up and down season filled with a fair share of growing pains.

But when the Liberty Flames men’s swimming and diving team entered the Georgia Tech arena for the Collegiate Club Swimming and Diving National Championships, none of it mattered.

“There’s a whole journey that brought everyone to that point,” Spencer said of the competition in Atlanta, Georgia, April 6-8. “We knew that was going to be the highlight of the year. It all boiled down to that weekend.”

In an event featuring 116 teams and over 2,000 swimmers from across the country, the Flames concluded their inaugural season with a 13th-place finish in the men’s division won by Ohio State.

“For some club sports, the goal of the whole program is just to make it to the National Championship,” Spencer said. “For us to be able to go and beat out (so many) teams was good.”

More than six months earlier, Liberty men’s swimming and diving team competed in their first event at Old Dominion University, where they decimated the five men’s teams they competed against. It ended in resounding victory, signaling the beginning of a seesaw season of positives and negatives.

With 707.5 points, Liberty was so dominant at ODU’s fall invitational that even the schools who gained points in women’s events did not have a combined score as high as the Flames.

Spencer said that the win gave his team a lot of momentum, but it was soon crushed by an unshakable opponent—the flu.

Sickness affected many Flames swimmers and divers and outright prevented the participation of others at a meet at North Carolina State University Nov. 11-12.

Led by freshman Ethan Raub, who won the 400 individual medley, Liberty finished in fourth place out of 13 men’s teams, but the event was an overall disappointment for the swimmers.

“That was probably a low point,” Spencer said. “It really hurt our momentum and we had to work hard to bounce back over the winter.”

The Flames were confronted with more adversity when some players decided to leave the team over the break between fall and spring semester.

“It became a challenge with the guys that were here,” Spencer said. “Let’s see what we can do as a first-year program, and if those guys don’t want to be involved in it, that’s their loss, not (ours).”

With a regeneration of focus and determination, Liberty went to their next event at James Madison University in February and scored an impressive fourth place finish out of 14 schools, including the 2017 National Champion, the University of Virginia.

Six weeks of practice later, Liberty headed to Nationals, where they were more than respectable for a first-year program.

“It was good for them to really see what we were up against,” Spencer said. “Once we build this program up, we’ll really be ready to go and make something happen.”

Building the program may not take as long as usual for the team. While Spencer said it takes most teams at least three years before they have legitimate national title chances, this swimming and diving squad may be ahead of schedule.

“We have a really solid foundation now,” Spencer said. “I think we can go into next year and already be ahead of that whole three-year process.”

With mostly underclassmen on the 2017-2018 roster, the Flames hope to gain more experience moving forward to next season.

“The first year is a big learning experience with a lot of learning curves,” Spencer said.

When it came to the most important moment of the year, Liberty was able to show how far they had come and realize how far they still have to go.

“To build a team like we’ve built, it’s not just getting a bunch of guys together that like to swim,” Spencer said. “To do as well as we did, and to make it (to Nationals) …I’m really proud of the guys that we brought. They came together as a team and gave it their best shot.”