Swim coach prepares Hoosiers to battle her brother's Wildcats

This weekend, the women's swimming and diving team will head to Wisconsin and Northwestern for a pair of Big Ten conference dual meets. These will be its first Big Ten dual meets of the season.\nThe first meet is at 5 p.m. tonight in Madison, Wis. The team will then travel to Chicago to face off against the Wildcats at 1 p.m. IU swim coach Dorsey Tierney feels the traveling will be tough for the women, but they should fair pretty well.\n"It will be a bit of a challenge, anytime you're sitting on a bus for seven hours, but we enjoy having the opportunity to go swim in other pools," Tierney said. "It will be an exciting weekend for us."\nIt will especially be an exciting weekend for Tierney because she will be facing off against her brother for the fifth time in her career. Jimmy Tierney is the coach of Northwestern.\n"It's a friendly rivalry, I guess you could say," Dorsey said. "Northwestern is a very strong team. He always gets good talent up there, so it will be good competition for us."\nFreshman Leila Vaziri also feels this will be a good weekend for the team. She is very pleased with her performance thus far, as are her coaches.\n"I think I'm doing better than I thought," Vaziri said. "I trained at home for 10 years. I think switching programs was a really good thing, and I have responded well."\nThe team is really looking forward to going head-to-head with Big Ten swimmer of the week Carly Piper from Wisconsin. Piper has always been a threat in the past to many of the teams in the Big Ten and around the nation. Senior Sarah Fiden stressed the importance of going up against Piper.\n"This weekend will be a good experience racing against some fast people," Fiden said. "We have Carly Piper at Wisconsin who has won the 500 and the mile and the 200 at Big Tens the past two years. We can hopefully project how we'll do by how we race against her." \nNo.14 IU will be facing off not only against a Big Ten opponent, but a nationally-ranked opponent in No.12 Wisconsin. The two teams are also joined in the polls by two other Big Ten rivals -- No.10 Penn State and No.16 Michigan.\nThe Hoosiers are 5-4 all-time against the Badgers, but this is their first dual meeting since the 1991-1992 season. The Hoosiers are 10-8-1 all-time against Northwestern. Wisconsin is 1-1 in dual meet action, and is also 1-0 in the Big Ten after defeating Iowa. The Wildcats are 1-0 in dual meet play when they defeated the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee early in the season. They dominated the event by winning 12 of the 13 races.\nVaziri is also very excited about the rest of the year for her team and herself. She feels having Tierney as her coach has added a lot to her swimming.\n"Dorsey is always on top of how you're doing and how you're doing it," Vaziri said. "She always has feedback, which makes you stay on top of it more, so she makes you always think about what you're doing."\n-- Contact staff writer Chris Hopper at chopper@indiana.edu.