weekend review: championship edition

Big weekend for 'Hoos of all stripes. Lots of blue and orange being represented in assorted venues around the East Coast - none of them actually in Charlottesville, but hey. Records were set, milestones were reached, history was made, championships were won. Yeah, the basketball team got smoked again, but don't let that cloud your perspective. It was a fine weekend to be a Hoo.

Starting with the biggest accomplishment of the week.....

SWIMMING

Huzzah! Like I told you last week, it's ACC championship time. UVA got conference championship #2 on the year - one of only two schools to earn two so far by the way - and did so once again in dominating fashion. The women's swim team added nearly 30 points to their total from last year and finished with 877.5. The results are here; I will summarize for you.

1st place events:
200 medley relay
800 free relay
200 IM
50 free
200 free relay
100 fly
200 free
100 back
400 medley relay
200 back
100 free
200 breast (tie)
200 fly
400 free relay

1st place swimmers (individual only):
Amanda Faulkner (200 IM)
Lauren Perdue (50 free, 200 free, 100 free)
Lauren Smart (100 fly)
Mei Christensen (100 back, 200 back)
Christine Olson (200 breast)
Liz Shaw (200 fly)

NCAA 'A' cuts:
200 medley relay (Christensen/McDonnell/Smart/Davis)
200 free (Perdue)
100 back (Christensen, Smart)
200 back (Christensen)
200 breast (Olson)

NCAA 'B' cuts:
800 free relay (Narum/Flynn/Harris/Perdue)
500 free (Bachrouche, Harris, Narum, Myers)
200 IM (Faulkner, Crippen, Shaw, McDonnell)
50 free (Perdue, Christensen, Flynn, Davis)
200 free relay (Christensen/Flynn/Perdue/Davis)
400 IM (Crippen, Olson, Bachrouche, Faulkner, Myers)
100 fly (Smart, Shaw), 200 free (Flynn, Harris, Narum, Moores)
100 breast (Olson, McDonnell, Freeman)
100 back (Cavalier (note - yes this is her name and that's awesome), Stewart)

400 medley relay (Christensen/McDonnell/Smart/Perdue)
1650 free (Narum, Bachrouche, Myers, Harris)
200 back (Smart, Stewart)
100 free (Perdue, Davis, Flynn, Moores)
200 breast (McDonnell, Faulkner, Freeman)
200 fly (Shaw, Crippen)
400 free relay (Christensen, Flynn, Moores, Perdue)

ACC records:
200 medley relay (1:37.33)
200 free relay (1:29.25 - meet record only)
200 free (1:43.86)
400 medley relay (3:32.97 - meet record only)
200 breast (2:09.94)

Miscellaneous domination notes: 4 of top 5 and 1-2-3 in 200 IM, and only one is a senior ... 4 of top 6 in 400 IM ... first place in all five relays and 9 of 13 individual events ... five records set and the final relay came within 0:00.02 of setting another one

Perhaps more records would have been toppled if we hadn't set so damn many last year. Oh well.

By the way, the difference between A cuts and B cuts isn't quite as gaping as it might sound. They're actually fairly unnecessary; the NCAA has a maximum number of swimmers they'll invite to their championship for each event. To oversimplify it, they invite all the A cuts and then go one-by-one and invite B cuts til they hit the max. Why not just have one cut time? I don't know. I liked it better in high school where if you swam a state cut time, you got to go to the state meet - period. (Not that I was ever in danger of making it.)

Anyway, as you can see, we're pretty well set to make a splash (HA!) at nationals, which will be nice for Director's Cup purposes. We won't win (not all those swimmers above are going to score points), but the girls finished 12th last year and maybe a top ten finish is on the horizon.

By the way, Lauren Perdue's name shows up a lot, as you might notice. That's because she's really, really good. And she's a freshman. There are some phenomenal swimmers up there, like Christensen, but Perdue is unbelievable. How good? Like, maybe Olympic good. You can use this to convert these yards times (used here) to meters (used in the Olympics.) Right now, that time is just off the pace that would have put her in the 200 freestyle semifinals in Beijing. You have to be elite as all hell to get onto the US national team, and she's not quite there yet. Give it a couple years. You just might see her in London.

But all these ACC teams have some incredible swimmers. I mean, we did let the other teams win four of those individual events, after all. The difference here is we have incredible swimmers in every event two, three, four deep. That's where the meet really is won. In no event did UVA place fewer than two swimmers in the A heat (top 8) and in just under than half of the events, UVA was in four of the eight A lanes, piling up the points. The B heats were similarly stacked with Cavaliers. (Sometimes literally. Tell me this young lady wasn't destined for Virginia.)

Bottom line: congrats to the ladies for kicking ass at the ACC's, and on Wednesday, get ready for the men to do it all over again.

BASKETBALL

Ah, now for the crash back to earth. Let me keep this short and sweet: Until the hoops team re-learns how to shoot the ball, we will go nowhere and there won't be any point in analyzing why. Turnovers, defense, rebounding, size, grueling travel, matchups, none of it matters at this point. We're losing because we can't shoot. It's 2009 all over again. Sylven and Mike Scott can't be effective, because the moment the ball goes inside, whether on a drive or pass, four defenders collapse on it because they don't respect the shooters. Bad offense begets bad defense, just like last year, and the result is ugly.

It does tend to debunk two myths about Dave Leitao's coaching style that were taken as gospel last year:

- The team was shooting poorly because they couldn't get into a rhythm thanks to Dave's incessantly inconsistent substitutions and rotations. No, they couldn't shoot because they can't shoot. A few more games of this will give us a very definitive answer to that particular chicken-or-the-egg question.

- The team's confidence was shot because Dave was screaming at them all the time. No, it was shot because they were losing. A lot. Tony doesn't scream, at least not during games, and don't tell me there's a small part of you that sorta wishes he would, just a little.

LACROSSE

Little closer than it should have been, but the lacrosse team earned Dom Starsia his 200th win at UVA. First college coach ever to rack up 200 wins at one D-I school and 100 more at another.

Part of the reason it was so close is that the Drexel goalie did really well for himself. Last year in our game he earned himself CAA rookie of the week honors for his performance, and statistically he was even better this year: 17 saves against 11 goals. A save percentage over .600 is pretty dern good.

On the one hand, it was nice to see more people besides just Steele Stanwick lighting up the scoreboard. We knew he'd be good, but six other Hoos besides him scored a goal, including hotshot freshman Connor English. (English is from, let's see, Manhasset, NY - I just bet that's on Long Island (checking: aaaaaand, yup) - and damn if Connor English doesn't sound exactly like a kid from Long Island who's really damn good at lacrosse. Between him and Steele Stanwick I think we're all set.)

I'm not sure yet where the faceoffs are going to come from, though. I hope we turn out better than the very average showing we had this weekend. Chad Gaudet was a one-year wonder for us, and he was very good, but his replacements (Benincasa and Ince, mostly) need to prove themselves all over again in his place.

Still: #1 ain't bad. (Even if it's a "tepid" #1.)

BASEBALL

Think this says it all, no?

We're similarly gracing the front pages of the baseball coverage on Rivals and ESPN. (Lax made the same ESPN page as well as the NCAA's.) Wahoo indeed. That's what happens when you're #1. Not just "power rankings," either; Baseball America and Rivals are generally accepted as legit actual rankings. UVA is #1. Just say it. It feels good.

The bats did their thing in Greenville, taking two of three on the road to start the season. That's good enough when the opponent is ranked #11. And I'll tell you what, I'm not even worked up over the disastrous 8th inning on Sunday in which ECU scored 7 and threatened to actually win a game in which they had been facing a 13-4 deficit. A lot of that was thanks to O'Connor's decision to start up the Dan Grovatt and Corey Hunt experiments as relief pitchers. We may not see a lot of that going forward, given the results. Nor am I concerned about Saturday, when the bats fell silent. They came back alive on Sunday, hitting .441 for the day, and Kevin Brandt (ECU's Saturday pitcher), I suspect he's going to be making a name for himself before all's said and done this year. Sunday was a hitting party and everyone was invited. All nine starters in the lineup gathered at least one hit, seven of them got at least two, and Keith Werman managed to be hit by a pitch. Werman has been found to actually be smaller than the strike zone itself, so this is pretty remarkable.

Actually, the only thing that worries me is that Cody Winiarski's debut was a little less than stellar, and Neal Davis had to be brought in to get the last out of the fourth. Yes, ECU has some hotshot bats, but so does most of our ACC competition. Consider the third starter spot still up for grabs, with Will Roberts being another candidate.

All in all, a weekend that true blue 'Hoos should bask in. Never mind the basketball team, Bennett knows what he's doing and they'll come around sure enough. Enjoy the dynasties we have going: one that's reloading, one that's ongoing, one being born in front of your eyes.

meet preview: ACC swimming championships

This was my sport in high school, so I take a little extra pride in the fact that this is a sport in which UVA is more or less the undisputed ACC lord and ruler. (Little personal note: my mom tried to convince me to try and walk on to the team at UVA, but....well, my senior season 50-yard freestyle time - which was the result of the most perfect race I have ever swam - would have seeded me 84th in the ACC finals. The women's finals. I might as well have tried to walk my 150-pound self on to the football team.)

Anyway, in the doing awesome things department, the women had a little catching up to do to the men this decade; the men's team won eight straight ACC titles until a slight hiccup in 2007, and then won two more in '08 and '09. It's only been recently that the ladies returned to their rightful place atop the ACC, and the men have a few more championships to their name, but back they are, and ready to go for a third straight year of simultaneous championships. Coach Mark Bernardino has built himself a true dynasty, and ought to be considered among UVA's greatest coaches in any sport.

Tomorrow, the womens' championship gets underway for four days of a swimming extravanganza, hosted by UNC, and the men follow next week, same time same place. How dominant are the UVA squads? Take a look for yourself on the psych sheet.

(For the non-initiated, the psych sheet lists all the seed times for all events, which are a swimmer's best time over the course of the season in each event they swam in. You have to swim an event at least once in the season to be allowed to swim it in the finals. Why is it called a psych sheet? Because you're supposed to psych yourself up by looking at how close you are to moving up in the seedings. What if you're the top seed? I never had to deal with that issue, I don't know.)

Anyway, that's the women's psych sheet - the men's isn't posted yet. So this post will deal with this week's women's meet. To summarize, UVA is seeded first in all five relays and a UVA swimmer is seeded first in 9 of 13 individual events. Some of these top seeds belong to backstroker extraordinaire Mei Christensen, whose unbelievable performance last year led to, among other honors, a nomination on this blog for Cavalier of the Year. She got votes, too. Christensen is a senior and already set to represent UVA at the NCAA championships. But lest you think our domination is graduating, three of the top seeds belong to freshman sprinter Lauren Perdue, a good bet to knock down a few ACC records maybe even as soon as this year.

But the most dominant event we'll have is the 800-yard freestyle relay, where we are seeded almost eight seconds ahead of the second-place team. Eight seconds is a bloody eternity in swimming. That's two seconds per swimmer, and to put that in perspective, two seconds in the 200-yard freestyle (the distance each swimmer will have to go in that relay) is the difference between being seeded 17th and out of the finals (top 16 score points) and being seeded fifth. Two seconds in that event is worth a full 14 points. This is the event to really pay attention to as you peruse the scoresheet. Last year our girls had a seed time of 7:15.81 and swam a 7:05.72 to smash the ACC record. This year the seed time is 7:12.80.

So what teams do we have to be concerned about? Who's a threat to knock UVA off the first-place stand where we belong? I took the liberty of scoring out the psych sheet - a highly unscientific exercise for reasons which I'll get into in a minute - and these are the results (Wake Forest doesn't compete, by the way):

Virginia - 914
UNC - 529
FSU - 457
VT - 306
Md. - 303
Clemson - 228
NC State - 191
Duke - 164
GT - 147
Miami - 116
BC - 60

Poor BC. You get 12 points for coming in last in a relay, so if you've been paying close attention, you'll realize they earned their points only by virtue of finishing last in all the relays.

That's what the scoreboard would look like if everyone on the psych sheet swam exactly their seed times in every event they're listed for. This won't happen, obviously, for quite a number of reasons:

- I excluded the diving; the psych sheet is horribly unreliable as not even all the teams are seeded with scores. There are three diving events - add points as you feel appropriate. UVA doesn't have a real strong diving contingent, but it doesn't matter.

- You can only bring so many swimmers to the meet and they can only swim in a limited number of events. The psych sheet seeds swimmers in events they won't be swimming in. As just one example, Liz Shaw is seeded and earning megapoints in both the 400-yard IM and 100-yard butterfly; it's highly unlikely she'll do both as they're back-to-back events. This is where coaches make their money, by the way - if you could just chuck all your swimmers in all their events, where would the strategy be? These limits prevent a team like, ohhhh say, Virginia, from crowding out all the other teams from the finals and blowing you away with sheer numbers.

- Obviously, not everyone is gonna swim these times. Swimmers at the championship meet tend to outperform their seed times - the interesting part is always by how much? And then there will be disqualifications. The psych sheet is highly unreliable as a predictor of actual scores, but it's also quick and easy. Here is something a little more scientific and probably more accurate.

But, though it doesn't get the scores quite right, it's probably going to be pretty close to the end results anyway. Because when it comes down to it, faster swimmers are faster swimmers. Swimming doesn't lend itself to upsets very much. Your top swimmer might DQ, and that would suck because you don't get those points, but that's not the same thing as throwing an interception on the game-winning drive. It's perfectly plausible that Will Sherrill would go off for 18 points and 6 rebounds after scoring 15 over a two-year career, but a lower-end swimmer isn't suddenly going to shave 30 seconds off her 500-yard freestyle time, and even if she did, it doesn't make her teammates do it too. When you dominate, you dominate. So unless Bernardino has turned into a complete and total lunkhead and forgotten how to fill out a lineup card (he hasn't) or the team wakes up tomorrow with a sudden and debilitating case of the 120-hour flu, Saturday will bring our second ACC championship of the '09-'10 season.

FOV Cavalier of the Year, #5/#6

The official From Old Virginia Birthday is June 10 - that's today - at which time this blog marks its first year of publication. For the birthday celebration, we - that is, me, and you the readers - will name the FOV Cavalier of the Year. My job is to pick the twelve finalists and write a few words about each that tell you all about their accomplishments. Your job is easier: to vote in the poll that will run once all twelve are finished.

Two of the finalists will be highlighted each day this week, today through Saturday. They're in random order with no rhyme or reason implied or intended. Today: Mei Christensen and Sylven Landesberg.

Mei Christensen - Women's swimming - Backstroke/freestyle/IM













Team accomplishments:

- Repeated as ACC champions
- 12th place at NCAA meet

Personal accomplishments:

- ACC Swimmer of the Year
- ACC Championship Meet MVP
- All-ACC Academic Team
- Took six first-place finishes at ACC championship meet
- Set new conference records in 100- and 200-yard backstroke
- Set new school records in 50- and 100- yard freestyle
- Member of four conference-record-setting relays (200- and 400-yard freestyle, 200- and 400-yard medley)
- Earned All-American status with 5th-place finish in 100-yard backstroke and 6th-place finish in 200-yard backstroke at NCAA championships
- Member of All-American 400-yard medley relay
- Member of three honorable mention All-American relay teams

Swimming was my high school sport, so I admit to being a touch biased when talking about the swim teams; that said, I think the facts back me up: The men's and women's swim teams are the most dominant thing we have going here at UVA. The men's tennis and baseball teams have done some fine work, but nobody rolled the ACC like the swim teams. Not only that, but we have more All-ACC Academic swimmers than any other school, which means we have both the fastest and smartest swimmers.

And believe me - it takes high-quality depth, more so than in most other sports, to be successful at swimming. But even with the plethora of great athletes to choose from, Mei Christensen is an easy choice here as a finalist. She's got enough hardware to make Home Depot jealous and more records than U2. And she's a junior this year, which means she'll be back next year to take aim at her own records; one nice thing about being dominant in the Olympic sports is your athletes tend not to go pro after two years.

Sylven Landesberg - Men's basketball - Guard













Team accomplishments:

- Beat Maryland and VPISU
- Otherwise, sucked.

Personal accomplishments:

- ACC Rookie of the Year
- Six-time ACC Rookie of the Week
- Unanimous selection to ACC All-Freshman team
- Second-team Freshman All-American
- Led team in scoring and ACC in rookie scoring with 16.6 ppg
- Team's second-leading rebounder and assist man
- Projected as second-round choice in NBA draft

The basketball team wasn't very good. In fact, it was lousy. Let's just get that out of the way now. That said, Sylven Landesberg was very good, and also, whatever you consider to be the exact diametric opposite of lousy. Landesberg singlehandedly brought a measure of respectability to an otherwise undertalented, inexperienced, and occasionally dysfunctional outfit. But maybe Cavalier of the Year isn't earned only on the field of play (or court, or pool, or whatever); Landesberg was generally considered nearly NBA-ready, and a strong set of pre-draft workouts could have vaulted him into the first round where the guaranteed money is. Despite that, as well as the firing of the coach that recruited him, Landesberg will be back next year, never a guarantee in basketball circles. He was the conference's best and one of the nation's top freshmen - next year, he'll look to take his place among the country's elite.