Waterville, Maine - In February, Colby hosted the Men's and Women's NESCAC Swimming Championships. It was the first NESCAC Championship held at the brand new Aquatics Center in the Harold Alfond Athletics and Recreation Center.  Years in the making, the creation and construction of the pool filled coaches and athletes with excitement of how fast the pool could be and what records would fall.  Little did anyone know the immense and immediate impact Colby's facility would have on the world of NESCAC Swimming.  

The pool features a 50-meter, nine lane pool, accompanied by two 3-meter diving boards and two 1-meter springboards.  The Aquatics Center is the first and only 50-meter Myrtha pool in the state of Maine.

The two-weekend event boasted some of the fastest times in conference history. On the Women's side, six meet records and four conference records were broken. For the Men, nine meet records and eight NESCAC records were broken, and even one NCAA national record fell in the process. In the evaluative aftermath of the conference meets, 11 NESCAC schools reported that a collective 139 school records fell during those meets.  Unprecedented. 

Additionally, 98 athletes representing the NESCAC qualified for the NCAA Championships, an all time high.

Head Coach Tom Burton credits Colby's new Myrtha competition pool for a lot of the meet's success. "Over the past two years, we have noticed the impact of the new pool in both our training and dual meet competitions which led to a sense that the pool did provide for the highest caliber of racing," said Burton. "These observations were confirmed when we hosted the conference championships, not just by all the records but by also hearing the comments of athletes on other teams about how they felt in the pool from the pool design, water quality, and air quality."

The engineers got this one right.  The pool is fast.  "The design process was exact, down to the millimeter in construction," continued Burton. "The gutter systems and bulkheads are designed to remove waves from the competition lanes in all directions, minimizing the drag forces or interference on the athletes from the front, back, and sides.  The depth decreases any interference from the bottom as well.  Our pool also benefits from a state of the art air handling system which removes chloroforms from the air that our athletes breath during competition.  The water is even clearer, thanks to a state of the art water filtration system.  Athletes can see better, breath better, and encounter significantly less interference in the water.  Our pool allows athletes to perform better, and we just saw the results."

Follow the link to learn more about Colby's Aquatic Center.