JANE LEE
Assistant Sports Editor
The Pepperdine women’s swimming and diving team began competition in the culminating event of the season at the four-day Pacific Coast Swimming Conference Championships in Long Beach on Wednesday at the Belmont Plaza.
In the only event of the day for Pepperdine, the Waves early broke a school record. The Waves’ 800-meter freestyle relay team, the only Pepperdine squad to compete during the day, placed second behind UC San Diego.
The Waves’ time, recorded by the team of sophomore Katherine Skora, senior Ketrina Lemmen, junior Ali McLeod and freshman Haley Wilson, was the second fastest in school history.
“It got the meet off to a great start and gave us a lot of points to go into the rest of the meet with an advantage,” junior swimmer Emily Sharp said.
The PCSC is made of an assortment of Division I, II and III schools. Pepperdine is competing against 13 other teams over the next three days including Loyola Marymount, UCSD, Biola, Cal State Bakersfield, Cal Baptist, Soka, UC Santa Cruz, Chapman, UA Fairbanks, Northern Colorado, North Florida, Texas Permian Basin and Seattle.
The Waves entered the PCSC with a season record of 1-2. In its most recent double dual meet, Pepperdine went 1-1 as it crushed host Cal Poly 205-92 and just missed beating visiting San Diego State, 155-145. At the same event last year, Pepperdine placed fourth out of 12 teams with 903 points, which brought its Top 5 streak to eight years. UCSD took the title with 1,449 points, while Cal Baptist placed second with 1,131 points and LMU took third with 930 points.
02-09-2006
