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The Indiana Daily Student

sports

Women's swimming and diving welcomes Purdue

The IU women’s swimming and diving team will compete at home against in-state and Big Ten rival Purdue this weekend on senior day.

The No. 11 Hoosiers are coming off a sweep of Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. They continued to focus on speed and power this week to build off that success, according to IU Coach Ray Looze.

“This week we have a need, a need for speed,” Looze said. “We’ve begun to add a little more speed-assisted stuff, and the team’s really responding. Today we did a pulley set, and we were really moving some great weight and still swimming fast.”

This meet is the second of three consecutive meets for the women’s team. Looze said it will serve as a measurement of how well their rigorous training translates to speed in competition.

Junior swimmer Allie Day said her team is focused on the mental aspect of the sport as much as the physicality.

“We are really focusing on our mentality for how we are going to compete at the end of the season and practicing in race atmosphere,” she said. “These next couples of weeks are our last weeks where we will tear our bodies down before we begin tapering. These weeks are crucial.”

While the team is focused on peaking during championship season, that doesn’t take away from the desire to beat its biggest rival.

The No. 18 Boilermakers are a perfect 7-0 in dual meet competition this season. They have most recently defeated Michigan State and Michigan, a team the Hoosiers beat earlier in the season.

Looze said it will be important to have a strong start to the meet.

“We’re just going to have to take it one event at a time,” he said. “There are 16 events, and that 200 medley relay is going to be critical to win.”

Senior diver Cassidy Kahn suffered a knee injury during winter break and said she still isn’t certain whether or not she will compete this weekend. Senior Kate Hillman will compete.

Kahn said this meet is just as important as any other for preparing for their toughest competition at the end of the season.

“It definitely has weight, being one of our biggest rivals, as well as being another dual meet as we come up to Big Tens,” she said.

“Just as with any meet, we want to go in prepared and give our best performance that we can give.”

The Hoosiers have won the last two meetings, 179-121 last year in West Lafayette and 169-130 in 2012. They hold a 19-10 all-time record against Purdue, including winning 11 of the last 12 meetings.

Looze said although it’s always important for them to compete well against a rival, they aren’t doing anything different in terms of their training schedule.

“We’re a championship-oriented program, so we don’t put any added emphasis from the standpoint of resting more for it, tapering down, anything like that,” he said.
“But, we’re competitors and we love to race, so we want to do our best. We want to represent IU to 100 percent of our ability.”

Looze said he wants to start putting more emphasis on having fun while competing. His team knows that touching the wall first is always the most fun, especially when it’s a team effort.

“We start hard from the first relay, through all the events, to the last relay,” Day said.
“This team is full of fighters, and we compete at our highest potential to not let our teammates down.”

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