By Zach Waltz
Assistant Sports Editor
The men’s swimming and diving team will head to Geneva, Ohio tomorrow at 10 a.m. for a meet against Atlantic 10 rival La Salle.
The meet is a tri-meet between the Bonnies, Duquesne and La Salle. Duquesne doesn’t have a men’s swimming program, so it will just be a dual-meet for the men. Head Coach Sean McNamee said La Salle will be good competition, but they should not pose too much of a challenge for the Bonnies.
“La Salle’s a quality team,” McNamee said. “They always swim well in the dual-meet season. I anticipate that they’ll want to take a poke at us. More importantly, we’re looking to go for a dress rehearsal and get our newcomers acclimated to their surroundings. Nonetheless, we’re looking to perform well.”
La Salle finished with a 3-3 record last year and lost to the Bonnies in their only regular season matchup.
Junior medley swimmer Ripley Danner said the team is well prepared for its first taste of racing against an A-10 team.
“We’re pretty excited,” Danner said. “It’s our first A-10 competitor, but we’re not going too terribly hard this week. We want to show them what we can do in the pool.”
Last year, the Bonnies had a similar meet against La Salle and Xavier in Geneva. McNamee said he and La Salle’s coach made this meet with the purpose of getting the swimmers, specifically the freshmen, acclimated to the A-10 Championship pool at the Spire Institute.
“We wanted to get our athletes in the pool we’re going to be swimming our championships in, especially our freshmen,” McNamee said. “It’s absolutely going to be the fastest pool we will see all year.”
The team has been using red drag suits in practice as a way to strengthen the swimmers even when they’re in the pool. McNamee said the suits are a competitive advantage a lot of teams use in their training.
“Drag suits are just a form of resistance training,” McNamee said. “It’s force resistance to increase strength. It’s a common training tactic that most competitive teams are utilizing. It tears the swimmers up a little bit and breaks them down, which is what we’re looking to do at this time of the year.”
The Bonnies are coming off a weekend with no action in the pool. McNamee said the team is trying to cash in on every opportunity they can to get better.
“Even though it’s a six-month season, it goes more quickly than you believe,” McNamee said. “Because of the breaks that go on with Thanksgiving and Christmas, things from that point really move quickly, so we have to stay focused and push as hard as we can through this time of the year.”
Danner said the team will continue training at a high rate until they taper to prepare for A-10s.
“We’re training as hard as we can and getting at it,” Danner said. “We train up to a peak and then we drop a little bit, but basically, it’s just uphill until A-10s.”
