After taking gold in the 50-yard freestyle last week, Caymanian swimmer Jordan Crooks and his University of Tennessee swim team set new school records at the NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Championships at the Jean K. Freeman Aquatic Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Crooks, 20, a sophomore at Tennessee, secured gold in the 50-yard freestyle event on Thursday, 23 March, for his second major win in three months, after earning gold at the World Championships in December.
The last time that the University of Tennessee won the 50 free at that event was back in 1980.
Crooks also became only the second athlete from the Cayman Islands to take first at the NCAA Division I Championships after track-and-fielder Kareem Streete-Thompson, who won the long jump event in 1995.
Before his gold-medal-winning race, Crooks and teammates Gui Caribe, Björn Kammann and Michael Houlie clocked 1:21.59 in the 200-yard medley relay to earn sixth and All-America First Team honours.
The following day, Crooks, together with Caribe, Scott Scanlon and Aleksey Tarasenko touched the wall in the 200 free relay in 1:14.68 to place fourth.
“It’s been a fun season,” Crooks said in an SwimSwam interview. “It’s only my second year here at UT and I really enjoyed it. I think just trying to relax and trust the training, the coaches and just knowing that you’ve done the work.”
Crooks recorded a fifth-place finish in the 100 free, in a time of 41.03 seconds. In the prelim of that race, he clocked 40.92, which was the best finish by a Tennessee swimmer since 1996, while becoming the first man in his school’s history to go sub-41.
He also finished fifth in the 100 butterfly.
In team events, he was part of the sixth-place finish in the 400 medley relay, the best result in that race for Tennessee since 2008; and seventh-place finish in the 400 free relay.
Crooks was Tennessee’s top point scorer at the championships.
Overall, Crooks earned All-America First Team recognition in seven events, the first time a Tennessee swimmer accomplished three individual top-eight finishes and seven combined All-America First Team honours in the same meet since 2001.
Tennessee recorded the swim programme’s first top-10 finish at the NCAA Championships since 2016.
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