BATON ROUGE — Five members of the LSU men’s swimming and diving team will participate in the 2003 NCAA Division 1 Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships in Austin, Texas from March 27-29.
Seniors Kyle Van Arsdall and Mike Jotautas, juniors Evan Martinec and Matt Rucker, and sophomore Francisco Paez will each participate at the Jamail Swimming Center. The LSU men are making their 18th-consecutive appearance at the NCAA Championships. The Tigers placed 20th at last season’s event held in Athens, Ga.
Van Arsdall, the lone diver on the Tiger squad, will dive in the 3-meter and 10-meter platform diving competitions. Martinec, an All-American the past two seasons, will swim in the 100-yard backstroke and will also team with Paez, Rucker, and Jotautas in the 200 and 400-yard freestyle relay and both the 200 and 400-yard medley relay. Those four have combined to set school records in both the 200 and 400-yard medley relay, both at the 2003 Southeastern Conference Championships last month in Auburn, Ala.
Jotautas, Paez, and Rucker will only swim in the relays and no individual events. Paez and Rucker will each make their debut at the NCAA’s, Martinec will swim at the championships for the third-straight year. He is the school’s record holder in the 100-backstroke with a time of 46.98.
Van Arsdall is coming off of a fifth-place finish in the platform competition at the NCAA Zone B Diving Regional on Sunday in Auburn. He recorded a career-best score of 490.10 in the event.
“We are very excited for these guys to be invited to the NCAA’s, it is a tremendous honor,” said LSU head coach Jeff Cavana.”These guys have all worked extremely hard this season and they are very focused right now and looking forward to it,” Cavana said.
The championships will begin on Fri. March 27 at 11 a.m. with preliminaries of that days’ swimming events. Diving preliminaries begin at 1 p.m. and all finals begin at 7 p.m.