Strong Saturday night performances allowed Wabash to put some distance between itself and the rest of the field at the 2005 North Coast Athletic Conference Swimming and Diving Championships. The Little Giants scored 927.5 points, finishing third in the final team standings on the final day of the three-day event at the Branin Natatorium in Canton, Ohio.
Senior Ben Hewitt (Greenwood, IN/Center Grove) (photo left), who narrowly missed a spot on the All-Conference team Friday night, would not be denied Saturday in the finals of the 200-yard breaststroke. He finished second overall, touching out at 2:08.08 while cutting seven seconds off his seed time and almost 8/10th of a second off his morning prelim time. His time also hit the NCAA "B" cut time, giving him a chance to swim in the NCAA Championships.
The younger of the brothers, Michael Hewitt (Greenwood, IN/Center Grove) also took home All-Conference honors from Saturday’s finals, finishing second in the 200 butterfly with a time of 1:55.32, half-a-second faster than his morning time.
The Little Giants saved a little something for the final race of the meet, the 400-yard freestyle relay. Hewitt, Kyle Weaver (), Michael Belanger (Crawfordsville, IN/Crawfordsville), and Colin Fahey (Indianapolis, IN/Bishop Chatard) capped the best weekend for Wabash at the NCAC Championships with a third place finish for a final All-Conference performance with a time of 3:12.52.
(Photo - Fahey leaves the blocks on the final leg of the 400 free relay while Hewitt and Weaver watch Belanger finish.)
Wabash trailed only 25-time national champion Kenyon in first place, scoring 1,640 points. Denison was second with 1,492. Wooster trailed in fourth with 694 points. Allegheny (685), Wittenberg (664.5), Oberlin (596), Hiram (521), and Ohio Wesleyan (326) rounded out the scoring.
The Little Giants will race in one final meet, the Midwest Classic, before waiting to see if their "B" cut times will be good enough to participate at the NCAA Championships in Michigan later this month.