This Saturday, the No. 12 IU water polo team will play division foes Notre Dame (OH) and Gannon at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., respectively, in the Gannon Tournament, taking place in Erie, Penn. This begins the final three-game stretch of division matchups for IU before the postseason begins.
It's a chance for the Hoosiers to build a strong conference record for a better seeding in the CWPA Western Division and Eastern Conference championships.
Here are the thoughts of IU Coach Barry King, junior defender Amanda Redfern and sophomore Alexis Jones on the upcoming matches.
On how much more important the final three games of the regular season are:
King: "This is everything. How you position yourself for the conference championship, your path through the tournament, stuff like that is of the utmost importance. We really pretty much need to win out from here and really make the strength of our schedule early worthwhile. That's what that was all about, was to prepare us to make runs through our conference. It's pretty much everything right now."
Redfern: "It's much more important, because how you do in conference determines your seeding in divisionals, and better seeding allows you a better chance to get to the finals, which is what we want to do."
Jones: "It's very important, because everything starts to count at this point, and it all goes into seedings for the end of season, which is Easterns. It's really important to try and get first, second seed at the beginning."
On how these games will help in the tournaments should IU meet either team again:
King: "Familiarity is always a good thing, but more importantly, it's about us getting sharper and doing the things we know we can do and things we're gonna have to be able to do in the conference tournament."
Redfern: "It's great, because it allows us to see how they play and allows us to learn their strengths and their weaknesses, and so we're able to work on that during practices and see what we need to fix."
Jones: "It's nice because we get a chance to see them, see what kind of players and offense, defense they're coming out with so we can work to strategize to beat them come Easterns."
On how much depth will give IU an advantage over Notre Dame (IU has 18 players to Notre Dame's 11):
King: "Pretty much everything. It's a smaller pool, so it takes a little bit of the burden off of having some depth, but we just pretty much need to go out there and prove that we're better than they are at every position and deeper."
Redfern: "Depth is very helpful, because it allows people to get a rest. It just allows people to take a break and refocus if they need to work on anything else, so it allows us time to get out of the pool and see what we need to work on from an outside perspective."
Jones: "It definitely will give us an advantage, because we have 18 players on the team, and all of us can swim really fast, so it will help tire them out."
On why IU has been so successful against Gannon (16-0 all-time):
King: "Good players."
Redfern: "I think over Gannon, just our ability to work well as a team. It allows us to scout the other team and to know who we need to key off of during the game."
Jones: "Definitely experience, I would say. We have a lot of players that have been playing since they were really young, and we practice a lot more with practice restrictions. It gives us a chance to work a lot more."
On whether the team is looking ahead to next weekend's matchup against archrival Michigan:
King: "You know, we've been looking forward to that Michigan match since May of last year, that's just kind of the nature of the rivalry, but we'll make sure that we take care of business this weekend."
Redfern: "This weekend is just focusing on now, this week is all about this weekend. Then next week, we'll start keying off on Michigan. We need to take it one game at a time, and we can't overlook any games."
Jones: "We're focused on this weekend right now, but we always have the Michigan game in the back of our head, and we're slowly getting ready for it."
