Wisconsin senior swimmer Bethany Pendleton has been showered with accolades for her outstanding performances in the pool this season for UW. Just this year, she won the title race in both the 200 and 400-yard individual medleys at the Big Ten Championship meet in Minneapolis, Minn. February 9-11. Her time of 4:08.92 in the 400-yard IM shattered the previous record, which stood for 11 years, by nearly three seconds.
As if the two victories were not enough, Pendleton was named the Big Ten Swimmer of the Meet and later earned Big Ten Swimmer of the Year. To cap it all off, Pendleton was in the March 29 issue of Sports Illustrated as one of the athletes featured in the \Faces in the Crowd"" section.??
""It's really surreal. This time last year I would never have expected any of this. ... It's great to go out like this,"" Pendleton said of her senior year.
Pendleton's performance at the Big Ten Championships was nothing short of amazing. The senior came close to breaking the conference record of 4:11.39, set by Melinda Gehrs of Michigan in 1993, in the morning preliminaries of the meet but the real fireworks waited until the title race. Pendleton and the Wisconsin Badgers swam well enough to claim a fourth-place finish at the Big Ten Championships, finishing below Michigan, Penn State and Indiana.
Heading into the NCAA Championship meet, the Badgers had set their goals high: a top-10 finish. Given their pre-meet rank (10th), it would be thought that achieving that rank wouldn't be too tough but the race was closer than the Badgers' had thought.
""Top 10 has been the goal for four years now and we felt like it was in reach after the first night. We had a rough [second] day and ended up 14th so I just kind of wrote it off [top 10], but on the third day we all just had great days,"" Pendleton said.
The Badgers bounced from 10th to 12th, back to 10th then sat at 9th for a time at the NCAA Championships. Pendleton, buoyed by her 800-meter free relay teammates, weathered the storm and earned a seventh place finish, as well as an essential 10 points, to pull Wisconsin from 12th to 10th in the final day.
Not only did they astound with their 135-point finish, the Badgers' highest ever, Wisconsin was also the highest-ranked Big Ten School at the end of the NCAA Championship meet as well.
Pendleton's senior year, in which the Badgers captured their highest rank in NCAA standings ever, was certainly a memorable one and the awards and honors she has received are more than well deserved.
senior Malinda Johnson, women's golf
