For the first time in four years, the Harvard men’s team sent four swimmers to the NCAA Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships held at the University of Minnesota.

For the first time in four years, each of them came home with Honorable Mention All-America honors.

In the team’s most impressive national performance since 2001, the Crimson finished a reputable 22nd place among national swimming powerhouses that fielded entire teams for the three-day competition.

“The NCAA [meet] is the fastest meet in the world,” senior captain John Cole said, the veteran of four NCAA championships and the 2004 U.S. Olympic Trials. “People are breaking all sorts of records. There are so many Olympians there.”

Cole, senior James Lawler, junior David Cromwell, and freshman Geoff Rathgeber represented Harvard from March 24 to 26, with each competing in two individual events as well as four relays.

The Crimson’s 200-yard medley relay was disqualified in the preliminary rounds, but Harvard captured 15th-place finishes in both the 400-yard medley and 800-yard freestyle relay. Each performance earned them Honorable Mention All-America status.

In the 400-yard medley relay on March 24, Cromwell’s opening leg put the Crimson into third place in the consolation final. His 100-yard backstroke time of 0:48.19 was just 0.22 seconds behind leader and perennial title contender Georgia. Eventually, however, Harvard found it difficult to keep up with a field dominated by pure sprinters and fell slightly off the pace.

“It was difficult for us,” Cole said. “For me, for example, I’m not a sprinter and I’m not used to those distances. When you’re swimming against guys that are breaking American records, that’s difficult.”

The Crimson met similar competition in the 800-yard freestyle relay, where Florida swimmers that had established the NCAA and US Open records earlier in the year torched the field by over 1.5 seconds. The Harvard relay again came in 15th despite battling the nation’s best sprinters, including Gators freestyler Ryan Lochte—a 2004 Olympic gold medalist in the same event.

“We knew we weren’t going to be one of the top teams as far as relays go,” Rathgeber said. “I know we didn’t really know what we were going to get when we walked in there, but we made the consolation heat and held our own against the top teams in the country and got some points out of it.”

Rathgeber and company proved similarly resilient in Olympic-caliber individual competition as well. Over the weekend, 10 individual University of Minnesota pool records fell and new NCAA marks were established in the 50-yard freestyle, 100-yard freestyle, and 200-yard individual medley.

Rathgeber swam to a 26th-place finish in the 200-yard individual medley preliminaries March 24 with a time of 1:48.23.

The next day, Rathgeber equaled that performance, finishing 26th in the 400-yard IM medley despite entering competition seeded 32nd. He touched the wall in 3:54.73, well ahead of two swimmers each from national powers Texas and Florida.

“[This meet] was an eye-opener for me,” Rathgeber said. “[Coach Tim Murphy] came over and said to me, ‘It’s not really how you perform, but what you get out of this meet.’ This meet really opened me up to the possibilities of the future and how I can train for it.”

Lawler, the EISL champion in both the 100-yard and 200-yard butterfly, placed 41st in the preliminaries of the 100 fly with a time of 0:49.07. He finished off his individual career in the 200 fly March 26, coming in 29th in the preliminary round in 1:48.15.