Swimming and Diving: Panthers set to host Invitational

Last Friday’s swim meet against the Cincinnati Bearcats was nothing short of a rout. This… Last Friday’s swim meet against the Cincinnati Bearcats was nothing short of a rout. This weekend, Trees Hall will again play host to Cincinnati at the Pitt Invitational Meet.

Rather than a traditional, head-to-head matchup, this meet will feature six teams competing simultaneously. The Pitt squad is looking to improve its record in the Big East as the team will again take on Cincinnati, as well as two other conference foes, Connecticut and West Virginia. The Panthers women’s team (2-3, 1-2 Big East) will also face Ohio State. And to round out the competition, the University of Michigan dive teams will compete against both Panthers diving squads.

Despite the assured chaos of having six teams in one building, scoring the meet will not be so different from a standard meet. Contestants still receive the same amount of points for individual and relay performances, and teams are scored one-on-one, out of context from the efforts of the other swim programs.

Because of this, the Pitt men’s team (2-3, 1-2 Big East) could chalk up as many as four wins — or four losses — by the end of the night.

Head coach Chuck Knoles isn’t worried.

“We’re getting stronger every week, which is what you want to do,” said Knoles after Friday’s meet. “And our times are getting faster every week.”

Both the men’s and women’s teams have had stellar individual performances. Every week has brought out season or personal-best times.

No swimmer illustrates this better than junior Kelsey Herbst, who continues to dominate every week in her freestyle events. On Friday, she put up a 100-yard freestyle time that was her best in two years, a 53.83. Two weeks before, she nearly posted a personal record in the 1000-yard freestyle with a 10:13.41.

So far this year, turns have proven to be the biggest issue for the Panthers. After the Notre Dame meet, Knoles commented that the turns were sluggish. But after Friday’s match, his outlook changed.

“The things that we were not very good at two weeks ago, our pull-outs and our starts, we’ve cleaned those up,” Knoles said on Friday. “They looked much better against Louisville, but they looked really sharp tonight.”

Starts and turns will continue to be critical in the Panthers’ races. The faster a turn or start, the more distance covered in pull-outs from the wall and the less distance spent actually swimming and expending energy. These points are particularly important in distance swimming, where endurance is key. Herbst attributes much of her success this season to the superb coaching done by head coach Knoles and women’s coach Jeff Berghoff.

“Personally, there’s a lot of things that the coaches have been trying to get me to work on, such as breathing off my walls and trying to get some distance off my walls,” Herbst said Saturday. “We’ve all been trying to work on that as a team because we’ve lost races against good teams because they just had really hard walls and they came up ready to go.”

Pitt has some momentum going, said Knoles, who plans to taper some throughout the week in order to allow the swimmers to perform to their fullest potential.

The teams will certainly need a big showing from the rested swimmers in the Invitational. The women face an undefeated Ohio State (5-0, 0-0 Big Ten) and Big East juggernaut West Virginia (7-2, 2-0 Big East), who come into the meet having beaten Cincinnati and Villanova in a tri-meet last Saturday. The University of Connecticut women (3-2, 1-2 Big East) fall in the middle of the pack after their loss to Villanova in October. Cincinnati (1-3, 0-3) will be the most manageable of the competition, as they continue to struggle in the Big East.

For Knoles, the meet serves two functions: to better Pitt’s record, but more importantly, to improve in individual performances.

“We want to lay down some NCAA ‘B’ cuts, qualifying times, some senior national cuts,” Knoles said.

The NCAA ‘B’ cuts could be a ticket for some swimmers to take part in the NCAA Championship meet, which would host the nation’s fastest swimmers. The NCAA will flesh out events that do not have enough ‘A’-level collegiate swimmers with ‘B’ cuts.

Herbst would have to shed about seven seconds off her best time of 4:49.56 in the 500-yard freestyle to make it into the crop of thirty swimmers selected to attend the championship meet. The ‘A’ cut for the event is a mind-numbing 4:38.46. Only eight women managed that time in the championship last year.

However, the most important thing she said the team must do is  remain positive, not just go for better times. Senior Ben Solari, a breaststroker who swims in the men’s 400 relay, echoed the sentiment in an interview Saturday.

“We’ve taken a couple strides,” Solari said. “We had Louisville and Notre Dame, who are the strongest men’s teams in the conference. And even though we were getting our butts handed to us, we still kept our heads up. Now all the underclassmen know what it feels like to win and they can kind of taste it, so maybe they’ll want it even more.”

The Pitt men will face two Big East teams that are undefeated in conference play, Connecticut (2-2, 2-0 Big East) and West Virginia (7-1, 2-0), as well as a Cincinnati squad (0-4, 0-3 Big East), which Pitt defeated 237-60 last Friday.

Competition kicks off at 10 a.m. on Friday and will go on throughout the weekend.