Junior Jackson Wilcox led the Longhorns to victory this weekend at the Texas Swimming and Diving Hall of Fame Invitational with the nation’s fastest time in the 500-yard freestyle and a win in the
1,650 freestyle.
Texas was victorious with 1,148 points, followed by Arizona with 1,003 points and Wisconsin with 446.
The team had a strong second place finish in the 200-yard freestyle relay with Jimmy Feigen, Donald Sutton, Dax Hill and Charlie Moore.
Junior Drew Livingston led the Texas divers by taking second in the 1-meter diving event with 391.50 points in the finals and second in the 3-meter.
Cole Cragin, Scott Spann, Neil Caskey and Feigen began the second day of competition with a victory in the 200 medley relay and senior Bryan Collins and sophomore Austin Surhoff came in second and third in the 400 IM Finals.
Texas alumnus and Beijing olympian Ricky Berens made an appearance and won the 200-freestyle while Hill finished in third.
Freshmen Woody Joye, Patrick Murphy, Matt Belecanech and Bobby Button had an impressive second-place finish in the 800 freestyle relay.
Head coach Eddie Reese was very pleased with the meet and felt that the team learned a lot.
“It’s the kind of meet that you get better every session, but you’ve got to pay attention to what you’re doing, you’ve got to pay attention to what everybody else is doing,” Reese said. “This has definitely been the best group effort of the year and one of the best group efforts I’ve seen out of any of our teams.”
Although the team was strong all weekend, Reese there is still work to be done.
“We’ve got a lot of little things we need to improve on,” Reese said. “We’ve got to work on turns, we’ve got to get better at starts, butterfly kick underwater — just a bunch of little things that this time of year you have to fix. A lot of those get better just because you get rested.”
Reese is pleased with where the team is at this point in the season.
“What makes a team, especially in an individual sport, is you’ve got to pay attention to each other and you’ve got to take care of each other and that’s what we did really well this weekend,” Reese said. “When guys were disappointed in what they did, the team took care of them.”
