March 19, 2013

While the national sports spotlight shines most brightly on the men's basketball team, other Wildcat athletes have racked up some outstanding achievements of their own recently!...

• Anthony Elias '15 won the 133-pound division at the Southern Conference wrestling tournament, earning him a spot in the NCAA tournament. Seeded seventh out of eight wrestlers, Elias defeated the top two seeds to win the league's automatic bid to the national championship. The SoCon coaches recognized Elias' feat by electing him Most Outstanding Wrestler of the Tournament, making him the first Davidson wrestler ever to win the award. He was also the first Wildcat to advance to the NCAA Tournament since Alex Radsky did so at the same weight class in 2010. Elias's first round match of the championships will be this Thursday, March 21, in Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa.

• Two runners on the track team broke school records at the Charlotte 49ers Invitational meet. Andrew Lantz '14 won the 800-meter run in a school-record 1:50.25. That broke his own school record of 1:50.87, which he ran twice last season. Lantz now owns the top three performances in the 800-meter in school history. At the same meet, Demetrios Pagonis ‘13 won the 5000-meter run in 14:09.96. That topped the record set just last season by Ryan Hopkins '12 at the Raleigh Relays. Pagonis' previous personal best was 14:17.27, which he also accomplished in Raleigh Relays.

• The Wildcat baseball team recently set new team records for runs and margin of victory in a Southern Conference baseball game, defeating Furman 22-2 at home on Wilson Field. Eleven Wildcats, including all nine starters, combined for 19 hits in the game, and just four Wildcats were stranded, thanks in part to three home runs. All 22 runs came in a span of four innings, with five in the third, six in the fourth, seven in the fifth and four in the sixth inning. The previous Davidson record for runs in a SoCon game was 20, set in a 20-19 victory over The Citadel on May 2, 1961.

• Davidson divers Kaliya Burton-Akright '14 and Karen Monuszko '15 earned spots during the season to compete at the NCAA B Zone meet in the 1-meter event. Burton-Akright was in contention to qualify for the national meet through three rounds of dives, but could not hold on. She posted a score of 214.40 to take 31st place at the event. Burton-Akright picked up her best score of the day on her first dive, an inward one and a half somersault in the pike positions. She accrued 42.00 points from the judges on the dive, which had a 2.4-degree of difficulty.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
###