With the Pac-10 Championships just a month away, the UCLA women’s swim and dive team (4-1, 2-1 Pac-10) looks to re-establish their success heading towards a tough stretch of conference dual meets.
The Bruins will first battle Washington (9-7, 3-3), which has given both Stanford and California, the elite teams in the conference, tough battles so far this season.
The Huskies fought their way to a 119-137 loss against Cal in late October and fell to Stanford 114-143 a day later.
“We haven’t raced in a while, so we are looking forward to that,” UCLA swim coach Cyndi Gallagher said. “Washington is a very good team, and it will be a challenge.”
UCLA will face a similar schedule as the team travels to Palo Alto next Friday to compete against Stanford and then to Cal the following day.
With a team highlighted by a strong core of seniors, these next few meets, concluding with a pivotal away meet against crosstown rival USC, are vital to the team’s success in the postseason.
Yet they still believe success will come by taking it one step at a time.
“I need to have goals at Washington,” senior Madeleine Stanton said. “At Stanford and Cal, I know we’ll be successful if we take it day by day, step by step.”
Two months removed from their last dual meet against Arizona, the Bruins are striving to overcome the challenge a formidable Pac-10 competitor poses.
“(We) have to come prepared to the pool,” Stanton said. “We need to come ready to race, but I know that the end will take care of itself.”
While Washington won’t bring down a dive team, the Bruins will still have an intrasquad competition in order to prepare for the upcoming trip to the Bay Area.
Though the Bruin divers got a chance to see both Cal and Stanford in the recent Bruin Invite, the back-to-back meets next weekend will provide concrete evidence of what UCLA needs to work on as the season nears its completion.
“(The meets against) Stanford and Cal are always good benchmarks of where we are going into the end of the year,” dive coach Tom Stebbins said. “I think that seeing where they are in a couple of weeks will help us know where we are, and we are going to continue to grow and get better.”