OAKLAND, Calif. --- Swimming in the same pool, in the same events, in a meet hosted by the same team for the second day in a row could cause some to become a bit apathetic and cause some student-athlete performances to tail off.
 
That is precisely the opposite of what happened to Biola Swim & Dive during day two of their NorCal trip as they excelled in Mills College's Bay Area Invite.
 
Head Coach Emily Mosbacher's team earned two new nationals curs and recorded 17 top-3 finishes in an expanded field of competition compared to yesterday's quad-meet.
 
Those individual accomplishments were represented with solid team scores as the women finished third overall in the six-team field with 352.5 points and the men placed third also with 356 points.
 
"Another great meet today with solid competition from the other teams," said Mosbacher. "One of the more impressive swims of the day was the Men's 800 free relay where they put up a strong fight finishing second just behind UC Santa Cruz."
 
That swim featured Tom Franicevich, Wes McCord, Andrew Benson and Michael Severi, and the boys posted a 7:21.50 to finish behind only UC Santa Cruz's 'A' team. This was big for the men's side as they kept close to a Banana Slugs team that is loaded with talent and ran away with the first place finish in team points.
 
No men achieved any new national cuts, but Lisa Tixier (4:40.63 – 400-IM) and Sophia Dammann (4:54.81 – 400-IM) both accomplished that feat on the women's side.
 
The guys did have something that the women did not, and that was an individual first-place finish. Raymond Kam won the 100-yard breaststroke by completing his race in 1:00.58 and out-touching a swimmer from UCSC by 57-hundredths of a second.
 
That was the only individual win of the day, but six other individual swimmers were able to post at least one top-3 finish.
 
Kam was absolutely on fire though as he finished with the win, a top-3 as a part of the 400-medley relay and two other top-3 individual finishes (200-breaststroke, 100-butterfly).
 
"We have two weeks now to train again until our next meet coming up the first weekend in November and hoping to capture more nationals qualifying times then," said Mosbacher.
 
The Eagles' next meet is a dual meet with Azusa Pacific in Azusa on Nov. 5.