Kate Rich placed 5th in the 100 fly and was a part of the winning 400 medley relay team on Thursday night. Denison is third after two days at the NCAA Championship.

Denison entered the 2009 NCAA Division III Women's Swimming & Diving Championship with the nation's top-times in four of the five relays.  Midway through this championship the Big Red are 2-for-3 in those relays after Thursday's gold medal performance in the 400 medley relay final.

Thanks to the first-place finish in the medley relay and a second-place finish in the 200 free relay, Denison sits in third place entering Friday.  Kenyon is the overall leader with 319 points followed by Emory with 246 points.  Denison has totaled 233 points and Williams College is fourth with 214.5 points.

Denison's team of Olivia Zaleski, Ksenia Golovkina, Kate Rich and Kristen Hohl set a new meet record and broke their own national record with a blazing time of 3:43.42.  Zaleski led things off with a 55.49 split in the backstroke and Hohl finished things off by racing Kenyon's Tina Ertle to the wall with a 49.39 split in the freestyle.  Kenyon placed second overall with a time of 3:44.55.  Denison's winning time trimmed nearly four seconds off their second-place time at the 2008 national championship.

The relays were the bookend events on Thursday night and in the opener, the foursome of Zaleski, Golovkina, Hohl and Annamarie Novinger set a new school record with a runner-up finish and a time of 1:32.14.  The old school record of 1:32.93, set by Allison Edsall, Bethany Tucke, Katie O'Connor and Kelly Lotts, had stood for 10 years.

Zaleski and Rich would continue their strong meet in the women's 100 butterfly.  Zaleski was the runner-up with a time of 54.44 and Rich took home fifth place in 55.38.

Novinger, another senior competing in her fourth national championship, placed seventh in the 200 freestyle with a time of 1:51.69.  That marked the 13th All-American swim of Novinger's career.  It was also her third top-16 finish in the 200 freestyle.

DU will return on Friday with the finals in the 200 butterfly, the 100 backstroke, the 100 breastroke and the 800 free relay.  Zaleski has the nation's fastest time entering the meet in the 100 backstroke at 55.71.  Preliminaries will begin at 11 a.m. EST followed by the finals at 6:30 p.m. EST.

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