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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

sports

Swim, dive teams set to take on SEC opponents

This season, the men’s swimming team has experienced something it isn’t normally accustomed to. The Hoosiers have lost to their first four opponents of the season, No. 1 Michigan, No. 3 California, No. 4 Texas and No. 5 Stanford.

After finishing ninth in the NCAA Championships last season, IU is now ranked No. 9. This weekend, the team hopes to bounce back as it plays host to a dual meet with Tennessee and Kentucky.

IU Coach Ray Looze said he expects to see high-level competition again this weekend. He said he’s worried the Hoosiers are looking like a beatable team right now and wants to see more from his swimmers.

“We definitely need to get more people able to step up while they’re working intensely,” he said. “We’re training really hard right now, but you have to assume other programs are doing the same thing.”

After a positive week of practice, the No. 9 Hoosiers hope to take a step forward. This includes leading from the start of the meet and taking the momentum early.

Looze said he hopes this weekend will “improve their confidence and get them turned around mentally” as they look to get back on track.

He looks forward to them being able to compete again with less than a week of
practice.

“Both Kentucky and Tennessee are good quality SEC teams, so the fortunate thing is we get to get right back on the horse really quick,” he said.

Looze’s main focus for his team this week is to be aggressive. The team remains confident in the overall progress it is making, even if the score doesn’t reflect that right now.

“You’re only as good as the last thing you do,” Looze said.

The women’s team is coming off a split, defeating Michigan and losing to Texas. The women are now 2-2 on the season and they face No. 8 Tennessee this weekend.

Freshman Gia Dalesandro said she expects IU will see similar competition to last weekend.

“I think some events we should go 1-2 in and others will be more of a fight to win, but I think we can do it,” she said. “I know we were all upset that we lost by three points to Texas, so I don’t think that’s going to happen again.”

Last week, the IU women swept the Big Ten weekly awards with senior Lindsay Vrooman being named Swimmer of the Week and Olivia Barker earning Freshman of the Week honors.

The team looks to build off of its successes this weekend.

“We’re all mentally preparing for the challenge and getting really excited,” Dalesandro said.

IU Coach Drew Johansen is looking for “overall consistency” from the divers. He said although each diver may not get a victory at each meet, the day can still be  successful.

“For me it’s about how they go about doing their dives, the process of the dive, more so than the outcome of the dive right now,” he said.

This week in practice the team worked on the technical aspects of its dives and the Hoosiers worked to simulate a real meet situation.

“This week we went back to the basics a little bit,” senior diver Darian Schmidt said. “We had two meets the past three weekends, and we just took a step back and drilled in our basics. Then we amped up the numbers and brought our hard dives in at the end of the week.”

Follow reporter Grace Palmieri on Twitter @gpalmieri7.

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