When the Western men’s (4-0) and women’s (4-0) swimming and diving teams travel to Atlanta for the Georgia Tech Invitational Friday, they will be competing against five other schools, including top-25 teams like Georgia Tech and Florida State.
The other schools competing are Miami, Rice and Florida Atlantic.
The meet doesn’t count toward the teams’ win/loss record.
Coach Bruce Marchionda said the meet will be the first experience for freshmen and transfers to swim three days in a row. Preliminary races will be held in the morning and finals at night. The top eight swimmers from the preliminaries race in A-finals and the next eight race in B-finals.
“We want to try to get as many people in the A-finals as possible,” Marchionda said. “I think what we’re looking for is for each swimmer to swim their best time for the season.”
The results also will tell the coaches which swimmers will score the most in conference competition.
Only 22 swimmers from each team (32 men and 30 women) can score in the Sun Belt Conference Championships in February, said Marchionda.
Sophomore diver Michael Freese said he hopes his performance this weekend will qualify him for the NCAA Zone Diving Finals in March.
Freese said the diving team has been without their coach Bob Benson this week because his mother recently died.
“We really pulled together,” Freese said. “We had one of the fifth-year divers help out, but for the most part, we were on our own.”
The divers prepared for this weekend by going through what Freese called “hell week.” Practices lasted about two-and-a-half to three hours with each diver doing about 70 dives.
At the invitational, divers will have to perform 11 dives on both the 1- and 3-meter boards, compared to the six dives in dual meets.
For swimmers, the invitational format means they will race in three individual events, whereas in dual meets they usually only race two.
The swim teams have been preparing by working on individualized training, freshman Jessica Aspinall said.
Aspinall said she has been on a three-day taper, meaning less yardage and more sprinting so she won’t be tired for the meet.
The Georgia Tech Invitational begins tomorrow and ends Sunday. The meet will be held in the 1996 Olympic Pool on Georgia Tech’s campus.
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