The Summit League Championship has come and gone.

However, Eastern head swim coach Matt Bos is pushing members of the men’s swim squad to make national cuts at noon Saturday during the Last Ditch Meet at Columbus, Ohio.

Bos said he is taking nine swimmers to the meet and seeing what they can do.

“Really, the relays are the ones we have a shot at,” Bos said. “We’re trying to get our 200 and 400-yard freestyle relays to have a legitimate shot. We are taking a couple people to swim events they weren’t able to during the conference meet and a couple people to see how they react on rest.”

For the 200 free relay, Bos said they were one second off a “B” cut for nationals at 1:23.02.

“It was the first event of the meet and we chose to go safe on that relay, especially on the exchanges, because we wanted to get the points up on the board rather than going all out and go for the win,” Bos said.”We were content with getting second or third. That is the one relay where we can pick up a lot of time just pushing it a little bit more. Going into a meet with no team points, we could really go for time.”

The 200 free relay team will consist of freshmen Colin McGill, John Wilson, Ken Tiltges and sophomore Tyler Hsieh.

Also, Bos said junior Cody Showers could swim in the relay, so he could experiment which combination works better together. Showers had a bout with the flu the final day of the conference meet.

McGill said the 200 free relay can improve.

“There was a couple slow starts where we could improve on,” McGill said. “It should be easier to train for this meet because it will be one day instead of three and it’s not as many events.”

The same combination of five swimmers will compose 400 free relay team, too.

Bos said he is doing this to better prepare some athletes for next season’s championship meet like freshmen Joe Ciliak and Mike Lehman

“We will see if they could go faster with more rest,” Bos said.

Junior Nate Moritz is competing in the 100-yard butterfly to see if he could beat his uncle Tim Bird’s 100 fly record of 50.86.

“I’m 0.8 seconds off (Eastern’s) record,” Moritz said. “In the 100 fly finals (during the Summit League Championship), someone flinched in the blocks and they started us all. I didn’t see anyone stop in my zone.”

Moritz and the swimmer next to him swam a full 50 yards because the officials did not throw down the ropes, so he was spent before his real race.

For the Last Ditch Meet, Tiltges said training is different from the league meet.

“We tapered all the way down for the Summit League meet,” Tiltges said. “Rested completely and basically what we will do is build up the yards again and back off again completely.

“We are also swimming shorter distances with no one going over 100.”

The last swimmer to make it to NCAA Nationals was Bill Sense in 2007. Sense made the cut by swimming 44.47 in the 100 freestyle.

Bob Bajek can be reached at 581-7944 or rtbajek@eiu.edu.