For coaches, the schedule for the season is important, because the season is completely based around it. Training plans have to work with the schedule, and it shows whether the week is going to be an easy or hard week.
Women’s swimming coach Brian Thomas said the first thing for planning the season’s schedule is setting down the big meets, like the Atlantic 10 Championship and the NCAA Championship.
“Looking at our training plan, we try to put meets where they’ll benefit us the most,” said Thomas. “I think early-on racing is a good thing for us and trying to rehearse what we want to achieve at the end of the year and get into a groove that way.”
Thomas said that one of the main things that he and men’s head coach Sean McNamee must plan around is scheduling against other schools that have both a men’s and a women’s swimming and diving team.
“We have to find teams that are like us, so that’s a big part of it,” said Thomas. “Then travel, the cost of travel and the distance travelled all come into play.”
Thomas said the advantage of dual meets is that it lets the team practice what they’re going to do at the invitationals.
“Against Central Connecticut, for example, we have a session on Friday night, and then we came right back Saturday morning and had another session,” said Thomas. “We can mimic the process of recovering between sessions, and obviously, our nutrition and sleep is important, getting up and getting your body moving the next day.”
Another advantage is that dual meets let the swimmers race how they swim in training.
“We train very specifically towards a particular goal,” said Thomas. “Our sprinters will train towards the 50, the 100, the 200 freestyle and they’ll hit particular paces in a workout. We try to tax them like they’ll be taxed at a meet.”
Thomas said that when planning out the schedule of meets, it’s good to have a balance of strength of teams that they’ll swim against.
“This coming weekend we’ll go up against Buffalo and a couple others that might be a notch above us, but they’re teams that we want to swim down,” said Thomas. “At the same time, I want to put us in varying circumstances. You never know what you’ll run into when you race, and I want our ladies prepared for everything.”
When deciding what meets to schedule, Thomas said geographically close teams often get scheduled because it makes sense, but other teams that are stronger are put on the schedule so there is variety in competition.
“Other meets where we match up with, say, Buffalo, it has more to do with the level of their game and getting us some experience with that,” said Thomas. “Any team can make you seem like you are world beaters, and then you turn around next week and they make you seem like you have a long way to go.”
The Bonnies’ next meet is this weekend from Friday, Dec. 2, to Sunday, Dec. 4, at the Akron Zippy Invite at Akron University.
Thomas said he is interested to see how his team responds after a month of intense training.
“Our last three and a half to four weeks of training have been pretty intense and really taxed our ladies in a way that they probably haven’t been taxed before, so I’m interested to see how quickly we can bounce back from that and see what kind of performances we can put up,” said Thomas.
The meet is also set up similarly to the Atlantic 10 Championships, which gives the team and coaches a chance to see how they can prepare.
“It’s always good to practice that and rehearse what we want to do at those meets, both in and out of the water, how we recover between sessions, and how we prepare for the morning versus the evening session,” said Thomas. “I’m looking to sharpen that kind of stuff up, and I think we’ll see some really good performances.”
signorra15@bonaventure.edu
