Records are meant to be broken but apparently stay in the family based on what happened Feb. 20 at the Summit League Championship in Indianapolis, Ind.

Eastern junior Nathan Moritz raced to beat his uncle Tim Bird’s 200-yard butterfly mark and succeeded.

Bird’s record of 1:54.33 in the 200 fly was the longest standing record for the men’s program. The mark was set in 1981.

Moritz, a natural at the butterfly, hit the wall at 1:53.8 in the preliminary round of the 200 fly. For the finals, he raced for a 1:54.84 mark and seventh place in the finals.

“I was just trying to swim my race that I knew I could do,” Moritz said. “I keep my edge and I know when I try to think about what I do in the pool, it distracts me. I was just trying to have a lot of fun with it.”

After the race, the excited junior called his uncle.

“It wasn’t a big deal, but he said he was proud of me and said congratulations,” Moritz said.

Ironically, freshman Daniel Enge swam 1:54.21 for ninth in the finals, which is also better than the old record.

Eastern swim head coach Matt Bos said Moritz shattered the record in the preliminary swim instead of the finals, which is unusual because swimmers go all out in the finals.

However, Bos said he was impressed with Moritz’s endurance.

“This was his goal, and we trained Nate this year pretty much mainly for that 200 fly,” Bos said. “The hard part was it was the last day of the meet after swimming two days before.”

Moritz attested to the work he put in to improve his cuts.

“I worked my ass off,” he said. “Every time we had a time set I would try to put the pressure on myself to swim fast and then try to handle that pressure.”

Moritz said that when the Summit League Championship arrived, he knew how to handle the pressure.

To beat the record, he had to adjust some of his stroke.

“I evened it out,” Moritz said. “Last year, I was going way too high out of the water and I was crashing in way too hard. This year, I decided to keep it smooth and think about keeping my head low. Turns were huge off the walls.”

The butterfly mark just scratches the surface of the Moritz family’s involvement in Panther swimming.

Bird was a top swimmer, who still holds the men’s 100 fly time at 50.86 from 1982, former swim coach Ray Padovan said.

“He was a great swimmer for us,” Padovan said. “He was second in nationals in Division II, and a record that holds that long shows his skill.”

Padovan also coached Moritz’s mother, Sharon Bird, in the 1980s. Sharon Bird held the 200 fly (2:13.42) and the 100 fly (1:00.01) records on the women’s side for a while.

Now, senior Kellie Logterman holds the 100 (57.94) while Kim Beasey beat the 200 in 1992 (2:09.97).

Having good genes was not the only reason Moritz took to the butterfly.

“It seemed like the only stroke that I took after,” he said. “Once I figured it out, it was a lot of fun. It feels right for me.”

Having recruited Moritz, Padovan knows his strength.

“That’s the stroke he swims the best,” Padovan said. “For someone who is as good of a butterflier as he is, he’s not a good freestyler proportionally. He is a good butterflier, period.

Bob Bajek can be reached at 581-7944 or [email protected].