The No. 3 Stanford men’s swimming and diving team won 132.5-110.5 over No. 11 Cal on Saturday. The Cardinal performed strongly across the board on its way to the victory.

Stanford’s “A” relay team of sophomore Eugene Godsoe, freshman Austin Staab, junior captain

Paul Kornfeld and junior Jason Dunford won the 400-yard medley relay in an impressive 3:15.74.

Senior Noa Sakamoto followed up with a victory in the 1000-yard freestyle with 9:19.11 in his last dual meet for Stanford. Sophomore Andrew Trepp swam a personal best 1:37.40 in the 200-meter freestyle to beat out last year’s NCAA runner-up Dominik Meichtry, while senior Daniel Beal, senior captain Phillip Morrison and junior Dan Priestly finished third, fifth and seventh, respectively.

Dunford continued his string of sub-20 second performances in the 50 freestyle with a 19.98 victory. Staab and sophomore David Dunford followed in with 20.39 and 20.76 for third and fourth place. Junior captain Nate Cass won the men’s 200-yard individual medley (IM) in a solid 1:49.44, and freshman David Mosko won the 200-yard butterfly in 1:48.90.

Cal’s Sam Helvie won the 1-meter diving platform with a score of 313.05, while Stanford freshman Brent Eichenseer and junior Casey Weston took third and fifth place, respectively, to contribute 3.5 points to the Cardinal tally. Helvie then went on to win the 3-meter competition, narrowly edging out Eichenseer, 356.70 to 355.73.

Jason Dunford won his second individual effort in the 100-meter freestyle in 43.86, 0.7 seconds away from an NCAA “A” automatic cut for the national championships. Godsoe won comfortably in the 200-meter backstroke in 1:44.35, and Mosko finished second in the 500-meter freestyle to Cal’s Daniel Smith. Kornfeld, freshman John Criste, Zaich and Cass could not catch up to Cal’s first place Sean Mahoney in the 200-meter breaststroke.

Pleased with the win, Kornfeld praised the performance of the Cardinal freshmen.

“We definitely have the best freshmen class in the country, and they are an integral part to our success this season,” said Kornfeld. “We are a young team this year that will only get better with the more experience we have.

“It will be exciting to see the freshmen exceed their expectations these next few meets and hopefully spark the rest of the team to do the same. All seven of our freshmen have a chance to go to NCAAs, and that is very rare to have happen. Yet we still have a lot of growing up to do if we want to reach our goals.”

The meet against Cal was the last dual meet of the regular season and signals the coming of the Pac-10 Championships next week in Long Beach, Calif. After Pac-10s, where Stanford will look to extend its winning streak to 26 years, the Cardinal will compete in the NCAA championships, held in Federal Way, Wash.

To be successful there, Stanford will have to find a way past five-time defending champion No. 5 Auburn, as well as the other national powerhouses: No.1 Texas, No. 2 Arizona and No. 4 Michigan.

“The key to a team effort is to perform well in the preliminaries of the next two meets [Pac 10s and NCAAs],” explained junior Paul Zaich. “Everyone needs to be at the top of their performance and focus so that the team can maximize the points it can score by placing as many people into the finals as possible.

“Therefore, we will be focusing on getting eighth vs. ninth or 16th vs. 17th so that we have the opportunity to score more points in finals,” he added. “Ultimately, if we’re able to place two swimmers in the top eight of an event in which Auburn wins, we would still end up outscoring them for that heat.”

The Pac-10 diving championships will start tomorrow at Federal Way, Wash., and the swim championships will be held March 5 through March 8. The NCAA Championships will begin on Mar. 27 and end on Mar. 29. Like this week’s diving championships, the NCAAs will also be held in Federal Way.

Contact Kenan Jiang at kenanj@stanford.edu.