After a weekend off, the Red will again be tearing up the lap lanes as the men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams travel to Binghamton for a dual meet tomorrow afternoon.
The men’s team is looking to defend its 5-0 record, after a sweep of Penn and Princeton two weeks ago.
After tough losses in the last dual meet, the women are looking to get back on track with a victory on the road.
Both teams are feeling confident about the weekend.
“We feel very good,” senior co-captain Kristin Conway said. “We’ve beaten them the previous three years. Hopefully we can continue the tradition.”
The women’s team plans to use the upcoming meet for training and fine-tuning. They’ll be using the opportunity to “fix some of the things we did wrong in the first couple of weeks,” Conway said.
After Binghamton the women will shift their focus to the Ivy championship meet at the end of the year. Every team selects their best swimmers in each event to represent the squad.
The men too are anticipating a road win.
“They are a team we should beat,” head coach Joe Lucia said. “They have some good guys and we respect them. But I think we have more depth. This is a meet we should win.”
Because of their undefeated record, the men are already looking ahead to the championships at the end of the season.
“For the first time in many years we’re thinking we could actually win the dual-meet championship,” Lucia said. “We are absolutely thinking about it. It would be a great thing if we could win.”
Although both teams had the Thanksgiving holiday off, training has resumed for both squads.
“The period of time starting in September is a couple of weeks of big meets. Now we just continue our training and preparation,” Lucia said.
The men will stay on campus and continue to practice until Dec. 21. The women will leave the next day. Both teams have significantly less winter break than the rest of the student body.
No one is complaining, however.
“It’s training — swimmers are used to it,” Lucia said. “We’re really going to bear down and work on our strength [over the break].”
The competition heats up even before classes resume.
“There is a huge meet with Yale on Jan. 13,” Lucia said. “They are undefeated and so is Navy. That’s going to be a huge weekend. We have to keep our focus.”
Some meets are more emotionally difficult than others. Harvard was a very high emotion meet.
“Saturday won’t be high emotion,” Lucia said. “We have to go in, be ready and perform well.”
While the men’s team will be training in the Ithaca cold when they return early for training in January, the women leave Jan. 3 for a training trip to Puerto Rico.
They will be conducting two-a-day practice sessions in the morning and at night.
“We’ll be working on our aerobic output and fitness level,” Conway said.