The College of Staten Island men’s and women’s swimming & diving teams completed the second day of competition at the 2018 CUNYAC Championship Meet at Lehman College, and the Dolphins collected a total of 12 medals by way of top three finishes. The men sit in second place behind Baruch College, while the women are steady in the third position overall.
The morning opened with diving, featuring the women on the one-meter board and the men on the three-meter board. CSI took center stage in this one and made it a clean sweep in the first and second position. Junior Alyssa Dunn, in her first competitive year as a diver won the one-meter competition with a score of 152.30. Right behind her was fellow Dolphin and senior Jessica Shaw, who earned 133.9 points on the board for a silver medal.
On the taller platform is was the brother team of Adil and Ayman El Haddad that dominated the action. Every dive was critical, but in the end, Adil’s score of 210.9 gave him the gold for the second year in a row while Ayman was the silver medalist with 193.4 points.
It was then time for swim events to take place and the first was the 200-yard Medley Relay. There, the CSI women’s team of Alicia Defonte, Lisnette Solano, Victoria Crea and Ewa Wojciechowska took a bronze medal with a quality time of 2:01.65, a good four second better than their seed time.
Six events later, Wojciechowska would continue her great meet, this time in the 200-yard Freestyle, as she topped a field of 24 swimmers with a time of 2:01.27, improving her seed time by four seconds and winning the race by over six seconds. Right after Wojciechowska’s win it was the men’s installment of the race, and junior Nicholas Defonte was more than ready, as he posted a time of 1:49.71, winning by less than a second over Lehman’s Chris Fischer. The time was over three seconds faster than Defonte’s regular season seed time.
CSI was not done there. In the 100-yard Backstroke, senior Brandon Lei earned himself a bronze when he came in at 1:01.43, his best time of the season.
To end swimming, the teams then braced for the 800-yard Freestyle Relay. In the women’s installment, CSI took the bronze as Gabriella Bartley, Victoria Musarella, Solano, and Cecelia Mauro came in at 10:33.54.
In the men’s race, things could not get more exciting, as CSI came down from a full pool-length behind to win the race with a time of 7:52.91, beating Brooklyn College by almost three full seconds. Jonathan Gorinshteyn, Leo Litovsky, and Christopher Sorensen set the pace while Defonte was an absolute bullet, earning a 1:48.79 split as the anchor, winning the final leg by 15 seconds to gain CSI the win.
With the conclusion of swimming, it was then back to diving and CSI was featured only in the men’s one-meter competition. Again, it was the El Haddad brothers that dominated. This time it was Ayman who was outstanding, putting up a score total of 237.97 points among the five divers, winning the event by almost 30 points. Adil El Haddad took silver, coming in at 208.12.
The CSI men unofficially sit with 138 points, trailing only Baruch College with 201 points. The CSI women have a total of 98 points. Baruch leads the way with 196 points followed by Hunter College with 145 points.
The CUNYAC Championship Meet concludes tomorrow at Lehman College. There are a total of 12 events, all swimming, beginning at 10:00am. Five of the events are individual events with the meet concluding on the 400-yard Freestyle Relay.
