Championship seasons can erase a lot of things, both good and bad, but the IU women’s swim and dive team’s goal is to finish on a high note, IU Coach Ray Looze said.
This week the No. 15-ranked Hoosiers will take their show on the road to West Lafayette, Indiana, for the 2017 Big Ten Championships. The meet, featuring five nationally ranked teams, will begin Wednesday and conclude Sunday.
Looze said the team expects a battle.
“You know Michigan’s clear and away the favorite,” Looze said. “Nobody’s going to touch them, and then it’s really going to be a battle for the two, three, four, five spots. So you’re really going to have to swim and dive well.”
For the Hoosiers, this week will be an important point in an up-and-down year. Not only does this week mark the beginning of championship season, but IU is coming off a three-game stretch that saw a win against Purdue sandwiched between humbling losses to Michigan and Louisville to end the season.
“Our mindset going into Big Tens is the same every year, and it’s just to have the most fun possible,” senior swimmer Gia Dalesandro said. “We do a really great job of just keeping things light.”
This time of year also marks the tapering phase of the Hoosiers’ schedule. In practice, swimmers have dialed down how far they swim so they are fully rested and prepared for championship season.
The team is ready for a “real meet,” sophomore Lilly King said.
“For us, dual meets are kind of hard ‘cause we typically train through our dual meets,” King said. “We don’t really taper in season very much, so it’s hard for us to race a lot of those top-tier teams that we do race.”
As for the actual competition, the Hoosier swimmers will predictably be led by King and Dalesandro. King is defending conference titles in both the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke, while Dalesandro has won the 200-yard butterfly in each of the last three years and will look to complete the four-peat.
“I don’t really know where to go from last year to be honest,” King said. “But this year I’m going to have a pretty good race in both 100 and the 200 from two different girls from Minnesota that weren’t there last year, so I’m going to have some good races, and I’m looking forward to it.”
Looze also mentioned junior Ali Rockett, sophomore Laura Morley and freshman Cassie Jernberg as swimmers to watch this week. Rockett in particular has experienced a renaissance this season. Just this year, Rockett won the 100-yard backstroke against Louisville, Purdue and Cincinnati and had an NCAA B-cut time against the Cardinals.
On the diving side, the two-pronged assault of junior Jessica Parratto and senior Michal Bower will lead the Hoosiers. Parratto won the 2015 Big Ten and NCAA titles in the 10-meter platform dive as a freshman and will look to continue her dominance there. Bower has also been stellar for the Hoosiers this season. She won the 3-meter springboard against Michigan State, Kentucky and Tennessee and swept the 1- and 3-meter against Louisville.
Parratto said the past few weeks of training have been hard.
“They’ve been big training weeks,” Parratto said. “But they’ve been really good, and you know we’ve just been focusing on getting as much experience on maybe bigger dives that we’re doing, learning new dives and, you know, trying them out at this meet, which is going to be a big test for sure.”
While the Hoosiers might be limping into the postseason after a few down weeks, the team feels anxious and ready to get into championship mode, especially considering they have finished first or second at Big Tens eight years in a row.
“We’ve got one of the hardest dual meet schedules in the NCAA,” King said. “So being able to swim a meet where we’re actually fully rested now and ready to go is going to be good for us.”
