More than bragging rights: Swim team looks to improve in NCAAs

When the women’s and men’s swimming teams practice together, it’s the men that normally have the bragging rights. The men have the history, the banners and the name recognition to back it up – including 79 individual National Champions.\nBut when the women’s team outperforms the men’s, the women let the guys know about it. Having qualified more swimmers (eight) to the NCAA Championships, it’s the women who are bragging this week. \n“The boys always have more than us,” sophomore Donna Smailis said. “So it’s cool we have more than the boys.”\nSmailis is one of several Hoosiers with specific goals in mind at the meet that begins today at the McCorkle Aquatic Pavilion in Columbus, Ohio, and runs through Saturday. \nHer goal is to add the 100-yard freestyle as the third school record under her name. She helped break the 200-yard individual medley record at the Big Ten Championships with a time of 1:38.89 and swam a school record 1:47.18 in the leadoff leg of the 800-yard freestyle relay.\nThe Hoosiers’ top swimmer, sophomore Kate Zubkova, will be competing in five events and hopes to get a top finish in the 100- and 200-yard backstroke events. Her time of 51.68 in the 100-yard backstroke bettered the Big Ten and school record by more than a full second. That time would have been good enough for first place in last year’s NCAA meet.\nZubkova, a transfer from Ukraine, keeps a quiet composure about herself, despite the success. When asked about her chances, she smiled and laughed.\n“I don’t really think about it, but I don’t know, we’ll see. I’ll try my best,” she said.\nIn diving, sophomore Brittney Feldman will try to improve on her scores from the weekend. At the NCAA Zone C Diving Championships, she took the third and final qualifying spot in the 1-meter event with 579.40, just half of a point higher than the fourth-place finish. That mark also automatically qualified her for the 3-meter and platform diving events.\nThe other Hoosier participants include swimmers senior Christie Fuchs, juniors Allison Kay and Sarah Stockwell, sophomore Presley Bard and freshman Amanda Smith.\nIU coach Ray Looze wants to see his No.22-ranked team exceed expectations and improve on its 11th place overall finish from last year.\n“On paper, it wouldn’t look that we could, since we are only No. 22 in the country,” he said. “So our ultimate goal is to improve on last year’s national finish, but anything better than our ranking going in would be a success. \n“We’re just going to go in there like the season is at zero. We’ll fight real hard, want to qualify as well as we can, and then at night we want to win.”\nThe team has made a routine of exceeding expectations in the second half of the year after posting a 1-4 start in the fall. In the spring semester’s first meet – the Notre Dame Invitational – the Hoosiers upset then-No. 13 Michigan. In the team’s most recent Big Ten meet, it topped then-No. 12 Penn State.\n“For a year that we had a lot of challenges, we feel fortunate to have that number of people going,” Looze said. “The meet is really going to be fast this year. Fortunately, we’ve got some fast people going.”