After splitting last weekend’s dual meets in Arizona, the No. 14 UCLA women’s swim and dive team will begin the first of a series of invitational meets today that will stretch from now until Pac-10 play resumes in February.
The Bruins (5-1, 2-1 Pac-10) head to Long Beach to compete with more than 20 teams in the Nike Cup, while the dive team will take on five schools and 30 divers at the Hoosierland Invite in Bloomington, Ind.
Swim coach Cyndi Gallagher said that the Nike Cup this weekend is pivotal because it gives the team its first taste of competition in the format of the Pac-10 Championships and the NCAAs.
“Because we have such a large freshman group, college format is different than anything they’ve ever done before,” Gallagher said. “It’s a three-day meet. It goes very quickly. You swim a lot of races ““ 14 events in three days. You want to have (the swimmers) practice doing that so that when they get to NCAAs and Pac-10s, they’re not exhausted and they know how to meet-manage.
“The upperclassmen still need to continue to race and get better every time they race. I feel like (the Nike Cup is) going to get them better (because) they’re competing a lot. They’re demonstrating how they need to compete; they need to learn from every race they swim. They need more experience.
“This is not a meet that is filled with a lot of Pac-10 teams but it’s a great meet for us so people can get second swims. We train, but we don’t race very often. Really what matters is how you compete.”
For dive coach Tom Stebbins, the Hoosierland Invite will serve as an opportunity for the team to see where it stacks up against the likes of No. 3 Cal (2-0, 1-0 Pac-10) and No. 23 Indiana.
Stebbins has emphasized this meet to his divers since summer practice as the one they should focus on and be most prepared for.
“We kind of always target one meet in the fall as our best opportunity,” Stebbins said. “The reason we do it at this late last chance is that we’re trying to get through as much work as we possibly can up until now.
“When we get to this point we feel like we’ve kind of done as much as we possibly could have, and so the hope is that at this point we can really kind of focus on being good performance-wise and not really fighting and struggling with some of the changes we’ve been trying to make.”
In both meets, the swimmers and divers will have to compete multiple times for three consecutive days, unlike in dual meets. Swimmers will compete in the preliminary races in their events, and will race again in the finals of each event if they qualify.
Divers will potentially have to perform three dives per event: one in the preliminary rounds, one in the semifinals, and one in the finals.
Junior diver Tess Schofield said the team will have to adjust to the process of traveling long distances and then competing. She agreed that the invitational will give the team valuable experience.
“It’s going to be a long weekend,” Schofield said. “(But) this weekend will provide us with another opportunity to dive in both a prelim and a final. So not only will you have to dive well in the first list but you’ll have to dive just as well in the second list if not better. It’s the same format that we’ll be competing in, in Pac-10s and NCAAs which is always good practice.”