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Matt Grevers of Northwestern took home three gold medals after the first night of competition, but it is Indiana who holds the lead in the race for the 2006 Big Ten Championships in front of their home crowd.

Northwestern picked up the first team points of the Championship by winning the 200-yard freestyle relay championship. The team of Mike Alexandrov, Kyle Bubolz, Ben Dexter and Grevers won a race that was tight until the last heat.  The Wildcats narrow edge through the first three legs was lengthened when Grevers took over the final leg to put the team in first by almost 1.5 seconds and take the first lead of the night and beat the A-standard qualification time.  Michigan's team of David Tarwater, Chris DeJong, Bryan Vessels and Peter Vanderkaay took silver in the event and Minnesota's team of Ales Volcansek, Neil Osten, Tyler Schmidt and Igor Ceresnek took bronze.  The Wolverines and Gophers, along with Indiana (fourth), Wisconsin (fifth), Purdue (sixth) and Michigan State (seventh) each met B-standard times. 

The 500-yard freestyle was next, with two of the best in the country represented.  Indiana's Sergiy Fesenko and Michigan's Peter Vanderkaay, the defending NCAA Champion, were in front from the start and set a fast time through the first five laps.  It was a battle between the two throughout the race as they pulled away from the pack by the middle of the race, holding a three second lead by the 10th length.  By the 17th length, Vanderkaay began to pull away from Fesenko and took a two-body length lead into the final turn.  Vanderkaay's first-place time  of 4:13.02 was his fastest of the season and good enough for automatic qualification into the NCAA Championship. Fesenko's 4:16.79 was also an A-standard time, and all others in the event championship earned provisional qualification.  In all, 10 B-standard times were set on the night. 

After two events, Michigan pulled ahead in the team standings with 79 points to Northwestern's 66, Minnesota's 62 and Indiana's 42 points.   

Minnesota's Adam Mitchell, Michigan's Alex Vanderkaay and Northwestern's Alexandrov were locked in a tight battle for the 200-yard individual medley championship.  It wasn't until the freestyle portion that Mitchell, who broke the Big Ten Championships record in the event by one one-hundreth of a second, claimed the Big Ten title.  He, Vanderkaay and Alexandrov both qualified automatically for the NCAA Championships and eight other swimmers qualified provisionally.  Michigan stayed ahead in the team competition with 103 points, followed by Minnesota, Indiana and Northwestern.

The 50-yard freestyle was an exciting sprint, aided by the raucous crowd.  The top-seven finishers all had times that fell within one second of each other, but again it was Grevers who had the edge with an automatic qualifying time, and pool record of 19.61 seconds to defend his Big Ten Championship in the event.  Cerensek took second in the event, and Joe Doyle of Ohio State and Todd Patrick of Indiana finished in a tie for third. 

There was a major change in the leader board following the 50-yard freestyle.  Minnesota gained the lead with 133 points; Northwestern was in second with 115 points followed by Minnesota's 112 points and Indiana with 101.5.

In the diving championships, it was Indiana, Purdue and Penn State and Indiana contributing seven of the eight finalists.  It was the Nittany Lions who picked up the 20 critical points from the 1-meter championship.   Mike Alderman's score of 354.45 edged second-place finisher Steve LoBue of Purdue.  Home-crowd favorite Ryan Fagan finished third and Purdue's Josh Karshen fourth.  After the diving competition, Indiana emerged as the fourth leader of the night in the team competition, overtaking the Gophers, who sat in second place, with Northwestern third and Michigan fourth.

The 400-medley relay was highly spirited from start to finish.  It was NU who got off to the fastest start with Grevers leading the way on backstroke.  He then handed it off to Alexandrov, who kept a narrow lead over Indiana's Kevin Swander in the breaststroke.  The Hoosiers took the lead in the butterfly on the efforts of freshman Nick Walkotten.  In the end, the Wildcats were too strong in the last 100-yards when freestylist Dexter passed IU's Patrick and took the lead for good.  The Wildacts time of 3:07.91 was less than half of a second ahead of the Hoosiers, but was enough to set pool, and championship records.  Minnesota's team came in third, followed by Michigan, Purdue and Ohio State.  The top three teams all set A-standard NCAA times, with five B-standards also in event.

At the end of Day 1, Indiana is ahead in the team standings with 187.5 points, followed by Northwestern with 161. The four top teams will once again battle for position in night two to set themselves up for the team championship, which will be determined Saturday night. Tomorrow's preliminary events begin at noon from the campus of Indiana University. 

Big Ten Men's Swimming

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