Coming off a fifth consecutive second place finish in the Liberty League Championship Tournament last season, the Ithaca College men’s swimming and diving team is looking to rely on mental strength and a selfless squad to challenge the daunting Rochester Institute of Technology this season.
The new season will see Mike Blakely-Armitage ’00 enter his second as head coach of the Bombers. With a season under his belt, Blakely-Armitage is looking to mold the program more to his vision. Blakely-Armitage said that now with more defined roles on the team and experience across the roster, he will have a more clear image of what the team can be.
“I think last year was a good kind of initial campaign for me, but my assistant coach Noah Beck is taking on designing our distance program and I think that’s a good change to kind of spread our talents out a little bit,” Blakely-Armitage said. “I think people have more experience this year in terms of our athletes and so we have a lot of first years from last year that are now like ‘OK, this is what I can expect.’”
One of the key differences on the team this season is the absence of numerous top performers that were with the team last year. Young upstarts will need to fill in gaps left by the graduation of two-time All-American James Collishaw ’24 and Michael Paulos ’24, national championship 400-yard freestyle qualifier in IM/breaststroke/butterfly. Blakely-Armitage said that while it will be tough to find a single person to take over for Collishaw, he will look to everyone on the team to fill that spot.
“So trying to fill his shoes with depth really instead of just like a one for one replacement,” Blakely-Armitage said.
To employ the depth approach, Blakely-Armitage will look to everyone up and down the roster, but there are particular swimmers who have stood out in taking the reins thus far. Blakely-Armitage said many swimmers will be involved in leading the team forward
“I would say that one of our seniors, [senior freestyle/butterfly] Matt Mitros is definitely going to be a leader in the pool we’re looking at,” Blakely-Armitage said. “[Junior freestyle/butterfly] Ryan Cooke to be a leader in his event by example, but also kind of firing up the team. We are looking at people like [sophomore freestyle/backstroke] Alec Kutsner. I think [sophomore freestyle/backstroke] Marshall Adams and [sophomore backstroke] Evan Wardrop are also going to be in the mix there.”
With a 18 to 15 count between underclassmen and upperclassmen, many of the underclassmen such as Kutsner, Adams and Waldrop have earned their way into prominent positions on the team. Blakely-Armitage said that on the team, there is an understanding that everyone will earn their roles, regardless of class, which is something the upperclassmen have gotten on board with.
“The first-years and the guys that are on the team returning kind of recognize that they have to fight for their spots and if there’s a person that’s faster, then they deserve that spot,” Blakely-Armitage said. “We just want to be fast, we want to be competitive and at the end of the day, somebody would rather see our team win than have to have that accolade or whatever. They want the team wins.
Because of a slight delay in the pool opening this summer, the team was not able to open up their practice as soon as they would have liked. Regardless of the delays, the team’s captains took it upon themselves to institute a training app to track each member’s workouts throughout the summer. Kutsner said the idea for the app was entirely captain based.
“Over the summer, we had an app that tracked lifts and workouts,” Kutsner said. “Then we started preseason when we got here, it was mainly just lifts and then we did team activities. Then we really got into swimming and we had Scranton for our first meet. So it’s been a while since we started swimming.”
For both the swimming and diving sections of the team, Blakely-Armitage took inspiration from a book he had the women’s team read: “Wolfpack” by soccer star Abby Wambach. The coaching staff has instituted themes based on the book for every week, which gives the members on the team something to focus on. Senior diver Samuel Smith said the themes introduced this year have helped him keep focus.
“[The themes are] usually like, ‘What can you give to the team? How do you present yourself day-to-day?’ and those have really helped,” Smith said. “Diving is tough and having something to remember and keep your brain engaged the whole time is huge. When you’re losing focus and everything feels overwhelming, because a lot of diving is corrections based on each dive, and those can build up in your head. You can’t think about all of them at once.”
The diving section of the team will return all three of its divers from last season which include Smith, senior Ethan Godfrey and junior Kian Long. Both Godfrey and Long competed at regionals last season.
While both Godfrey and Long have been diving for many years prior to their collegiate careers, Smith is entering his second year of diving after he was discovered by divers on the team doing dives independently in Ithaca. Smith has found a natural knack for diving and diving coach Chris Griffin emphasized the tightness of the group, saying he is looking forward to how far the team can go.
“We got a strong group,” Griffin said. “[Godfrey] has been here for a long time, on and off the team with COVID and eligibility and everything else, so seeing where he kind of comes through. I’m interested to see how this group of guys really just develop through the season. We got big competitions against RIT and SUNY Geneseo. Both those teams have some of the top divers in the country.”
While men’s diving has been around the top of the Liberty League for the past five years, the women’s team has been dominant in recent years, most recently with then-junior Kailee Payne winning the national championship in both the 1-meter and 3-meter last season. Griffin said he is trying to invigorate the men’s side to get to that same point.
“We have a very strong women’s diving culture here and the men’s diving culture has been something we’re trying to build those numbers on,” Griffin said. “They’re working a lot. It’s great to have a group of guys who are focused on goals for them.”
The Bombers started their season with a big 185-109 win at the University of Scranton and have been on a roll since, beating the Worcester Polytechnic Institute 148-145 and Roger Williams University 159-121. Unfortunately, the Bombers dropped their first home meet to the Rensselaer Polytechnic University Engineers 170-127 on Nov. 2. The Bombers will look to rebound as they face off against their dreaded rival: the SUNY Cortland Red Dragons at 1 p.m. Nov. 9 at the Kelsey Partridge Bird Natatorium.
