By Anthony Gannon
Sports Editor
The women’s swimming and diving team heads to Pittsburgh today for an 11 a.m. meet with the Panthers tomorrow.
The Bonnies had a promising opening to the season last Saturday at the WNY Invitational at Buffalo.
For the Pitt meet, the team is taking a different approach than the WNY Invitational by putting swimmers in events they didn’t swim in Buffalo.
“We were swimming tired for the Invite, because of our training,” Coach Seth Johnson said. “For this weekend, we’re putting swimmers in events to take advantage of the other team’s weaknesses in events. At the Invite, we had our swimmers in their best individual events. Now it’s about putting swimmers in events and places to give us the best position for success.”
The team’s preparation won’t be any different for Pitt despite this weekend’s meet being between only two teams as opposed to last week’s meet which featured four other teams competing against the Bonnies.
“The only real difference will be in our lineup for the meet and what races we’re going to be putting some people in,” Johnson said. “As far as our physical preparation, we won’t do too much different.”
Last weekend’s Invitational showed off some solid performances from underclassmen, including sophomore Lauren Caldwell, and freshmen Elizabeth Malone and Adelyn Graf.
“We saw a mix of results last week, and they were mostly good results,” Johnson said. “Several swimmers finished above where we expected in the meet, some were where we thought they would be, but we also saw some things we need to work on.”
Caldwell placed second in the 400-yard Individual Medley and the 200-yard Butterfly. She just missed the podium in the 200-yard IM and the 100-yard Butterfly with a fourth place finish in each race.
Junior Jeanette Dietrich came in fourth in the 50-yard Freestyle. Malone finished first in the 200-yard Butterfly and Graf finished second in the 100-yard Backstroke.
“Overall it was pretty usual for our first meet,” Johnson said. “There were some races that stuck out to us, but overall we were pleased with the results.”
This early in the season, the results aren’t as important as the team’s preparation for conference meets later in the season, according to Johnson.
“With our preparation, we’re going into these meets physically spent,” Johnson said. “The type of training we do, you can’t put a lot of stock into the results this early. We’ve got racers who are sharper and some who are a little sluggish. It usually evens out over the season so we’re expecting our times to improve.”
