Starting today, UCLA’s swim and dive team will face tough competition in its last challenges away from home this year.
The swim team heads to Federal Way, Wash., to compete in the Short Course National Championships, which runs today through Saturday, and the Long Course Time Final Invitational, which will be held on Sunday.
The competition in Washington this weekend will be arguably the toughest the team has seen this year.
In addition to NCAA teams, independent swim teams from across the nation will converge on the Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatic Center, with a number of the teams boasting some of the top swimmers in the country.
Many 2008 Summer Olympians will be present. Katie Hoff, who racked up three medals in Beijing, will be swimming for FAST Swim Team and will be competing in six events.
Rebecca Soni, who set the world record in the 200-meter breaststroke in Beijing, will also be competing, as a member of the Trojan Swim Club.
The short course races will be in 25-yard pools, a length typical for Pac-10 competition, while the long course races will use pools 50 meters in length, the length used in Olympic competition.
Meanwhile, the diving team will head to the University of Texas for the Texas Swimming and Diving Hall of Fame Invitational.
UCLA will face a strong field over the course of the three-day invitational, which includes some of the top teams from different NCAA Zones across the country.
Dive coach Tom Stebbins said that going up against tough competition will help his divers later in the year.
“Our zone (Zone E) is going to be very deep this year,” Stebbins said, “but I would say (the strength of this field) is comparable to our conference meet.”
“This is our third opportunity,” Stebbins added. “I’m excited because I think the work we’ve done is really good; I want to see it pay off and hopefully it will.”
For both swim and dive, this weekend marks the last competitions away from home until February. After this week, both teams will take a long break before kicking off their first season at the Spieker Aquatics Center with a matchup against Kansas and Fresno State in early January.