Moshe Kohen hasn’t shaved his beard in four months. It has become thicker than ever, and he said his girlfriend doesn’t like it.

But today it’s coming off – along with the hair on the rest of his head.

‘You have to change your attitude,’ Kohen said. ‘This is war. No more games.’

The 23-year-old sophomore is giving himself an extreme makeover because the pinnacle of the Syracuse swimming and diving team’s entire season starts today and runs through Saturday at the Big East Championships in East Meadow, N.Y.

The past few years, SU head coach Lou Walker has strategically refined the team’s schedule to allow for a smooth transition into the four-day marathon. He has emphasized multi-day meets instead dual meets to prepare his team for the conference championships.

‘We’ve trained six months for this,’ said Kohen, who will compete in the 100- and 200-yard butterfly events. ‘When we say this is a big meet, we mean it is a big meet.’

While Kohen aims to make the first cut from 30 plus swimmers to 16 in the 100 and 200-yard butterfly, several other SU athletes are near the top in their respective events.

On the men’s side, freshman Kuba Koytnia is the closest to an NCAA Championship-qualifying time. The rookie from Poland has seamlessly continued the Orange’s excellence in the breaststroke. Fellow Polish swimmer, 2007 graduate Luk Boral, placed first in the 200-yard breaststroke at the Big East Championships in 2006 (1:58.53), 2005 (1:58.75) and 2004 (1:59.30).

Kotynia hasn’t cracked the two-minute barrier, but he currently holds the second seed in the 200 breaststroke with a time of 2:00.63, which is merely .03 seconds shy of a provisional NCAA time (the automatic qualification time is 1:57.09).

Other Orange men seeded favorably are Berk Kahraman in the 200-yard backstroke (3rd, 1:49.12), Arda Isiksalan in the 100-yard backstroke (4th, 50.75) and Alex Taraskin in the 200-yard freestyle (4th, 1:40.67). Taraskin is also in the top seven for three other individual events.

‘We have a group of kids that have the potential to win an event or two at the conference meet,’ Walker said. ‘Hopefully we can bring a title home.’

For the SU women, Natalie Mazzetta is only .02 seconds from a NCAA-provisional time in the 500-yard freestyle (4:54.04) – good for a second seed in the conference championships. She also is ranked fifth in the 200 fly and 400-yard individual medley. Catrina Roth is slotted third in the 100 (56.50) and 200 (2:01.66) backstroke events.

But for most Orange swimmers like Kohen, the Big East climax isn’t about medals, rather spiked adrenaline. Kohen isn’t necessarily a threat to place at the meet, but the next four days can still produce career thrills.

He would know.

Last year at the Big East Championships, the Israel native tied with another swimmer for 16th place in the first round of the 200 fly, prompting a ‘swim-off’ 35 minutes later to see who would advance. It was the day’s last event, meaning the pool was empty, except for the two swimmers’ raucous teammates.

Despite earning a better time than he had a half-hour earlier, Kohen lost the sudden-death swim-off. The atmosphere still lingers, though, and he is eager to revisit it.

‘Everyone was really into (the swim-off) because it doesn’t happen a lot in my event,’ he said. ‘We live for those type of situations.’

They’re situations Walker has made a point to simulate throughout the season.

All nine of the aforementioned individual top-five times were earned at invitational meets, rather than the old-school, two-team variety. Throughout the years, Walker has gradually changed his team’s schedule and practices to put supreme focus on such meets as Nike Cup and the U.S. Short Course Nationals – where all nine times were earned. This season the Orange competed in five dual meets and five multi-team meets, making the 10-plus dual-meet schedules SU regularly had just more than a decade ago appear prehistoric.

All of that preparation and planning will culminate today.

‘This is why we wake up at 5:20 a.m. on the coldest days to go up the Hill to practice,’ Kohen said. ‘This is intense.’

thdunne@syr.edu

Published on February 19, 2008 at 12:00 pm