Rice University's swim team wins conference title by 24 hundredths of a second

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Rice swimming and diving head coach Seth Huston is still wearing his American Athletic Conference Championship hat two days after the Owls claimed their first conference title since 2014.

"It's great," Huston told me. "I figure I'm going to wear this around for a couple of days."

On Saturday in Dallas, Rice needed the perfect combination of results in the final event to beat their rivals, Florida International.

The Owls got exactly what they needed by a margin of .24 of a second. The result means even more after years of frustrating near misses in the conference championships.

"You kind of forget when you come up close a few times," Huston said. "We were close. We gave it a good fight, but it didn't happen."

This time, it did happen. Lacking any swimmers who qualified in the 100-meter finals, Huston instead turned to his best swimmers, regardless of their specialty, in the 4 X 100-meter relay that decided the championship.

He told his swimmers before the race exactly what needed to happen for the Owls to claim the title, and it all fell into place.

Tulane beat Florida International, and Rice finished fourth in the relay by .24 seconds to provide the winning margin in the team race.

At first, the Rice swimmers didn't know if they had done enough or not. Then Huston sent an assistant coach to the far end of the pool deck, and the wild celebration began.

"All the girls freaked out," he said. "For as happy as they are... dang, there's a lot of tears there. There were a lot of happy, emotional tears."

One more measure of the Owls' razor-thin winning margin is Rice's score of 1,475.5 points in the meet to win by 1.5 points.

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