Rutgers heads to Indiana for Big Ten Championships

After five months of competition, the Rutgers swimming and diving team will be heading to Bloomington, Indiana for the 2019 Big Ten Championships. The championship event will take place at the Counsilman-Billingsley Aquatics Center and run from Wednesday through Saturday. 

The Scarlet Knights will head into the tournament off a historic season with two invitational titles, six dual meet victories, six NCAA B standard times, a new school record and multiple pool records at the Sonny Werblin Recreation Center and across the country. 

Rutgers will take four swimmers into the meet with experience not just in the Big Ten Championships, but in the deepest round as seniors Francesca Stoppa and Vera Koprivova, along with juniors Federica Greco and Francesca Bertotto all made it to the final round of last year’s tournament. 

Koprivova hopes to contend in the postseason in the 200-yard backstroke, where she finished fifth in the conference championships last year. She currently owns the second-fastest time in the backstroke event in the conference. 

She will also be contending for the 400-yard individual medley in Indiana. She is slated at a No. 11 seed for the Big Ten Championships.

Making her first postseason appearance will be freshman Terka Grusova, who is seeded at the No. 9 spot in the 100-yard backstroke for this week. She added a victory for the Knights against Nebraska on Feb. 2.

"It's about finishing what we started," said head coach Jon Maccoll, according to scarletknights.com. "This team is closer than they've ever been, and they want to swim fast and score high for each other.”

In its final dual meet of the season, on Feb. 2 against Nebraska, Rutgers fell 33 points shy of the Cornhuskers’ top score of 190. 

Despite a low team score, the Knights had several individual wins in Lincoln, Nebraska. Most notably, Bertotto finished the season undefeated in the distance freestyle event. She edged out her competition by approximately 14 seconds to take a first-place finish in the event.

Stoppa was another swimmer that fared well in Rutgers’ recent competition. She swept the individual butterfly events in Nebraska and has accumulated nine wins in the event since November. Stoppa has 11 event wins this season in her last year on the Banks.

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