Riding high after recent winning streaks, the University of Wisconsin men’s swim team (5-2, 1-1 Big Ten) and women’s swim team (5-1, 2-0 Big Ten) are looking forward to continuing their success at this weekend’s Big Ten Quad Duals. The Badgers will travel to the University Aquatic Center in Minneapolis, Minn., where the two-day meet will mark the end of the dual-meet season.
“I think they’re excited because we’re just about ready to start resting for Big Tens and NCAAs,” Wisconsin head coach Eric Hansen said. “They know this is the big turning point to start getting really sharp.”
Both teams have been swimming well as of late — the women are on a two-meet win streak after placing an impressive third at the Texas Invitational, while the men have won three in a row, including a 216-80 win over St. Olaf and also placing third in Texas.
“Right now we’ve been doing well, clicking as a team, going fast when we need to go fast. Mainly in Texas we all went really, really fast,” senior captain Kyle Sorensen said. “I think that was the best performance in Texas in my four years — that’s usually a really big meet for us.”
Last Saturday, the Badger women swam to a 174-65 win over UW-Green Bay. The dual-meet was the 100th for Hansen while coaching the women’s program. Junior Candice Peak swam well, as she scored three individual event wins in the 200-meter freestyle, back, stroke and IM, while freshman Beckie Thompson took the top spot in the 50-meter freestyle and anchored the team to wins in the 200-meter medley and freestyle relays.
“The two teams’ performance this year, I think, has been the best it’s been since I’ve been here, and I know the coaches keep telling us how its been the best since they’ve been here,” Peak said. “The team we have right now, we all click together and we’ve got huge talent, especially in our underclassmen, so we’re very lucky with that.”
Each year, the Big Ten Quad Duals are held right before the conference and NCAA championships. As a result, it would not be a stretch to see teams look past these final dual-meets, but the Badgers are still looking at this weekend as an important meet.
“We do need this meet,” Hansen said. “We need to compete and race ourselves into ‘race form,’ I would call it. We’ll use it as kind of a test set to get our snap back.”
Luckily for Hansen and the Badgers, history seems to be on their side. Since the 1999-00 season, UW has won 45 consecutive conference dual-meets. Also in that season, the Badgers began their streak of 25 consecutive wins at the Quad Duals.
However, Hansen is not about to let his teams get ahead of themselves.
“We’ve had a little bit of everything,” Hansen said. “We’ve gone to that meet and been completely flat because we were so close to our Christmas training and we hadn’t raced a whole lot — now we have two meets under our belt before this so I think we will be sharper.”
Hansen also acknowledges while the team does have to travel to Minneapolis, rest is not a major concern.
“We can’t control the amount of rest that the other teams have, but it all comes out in the wash at the end of the season, at NCAA’s,” Hansen said. “You want to be starting to rest, but you don’t want to be too sharp because you don’t want to peak for another seven, eight weeks. Some teams will show up pretty sharp, but that’s fine, that’s their choice — each team is coached with a little bit of a different philosophy.”
This weekend, the Badgers will be facing tough competition in Minnesota and Purdue, and the women will also take on Illinois. Both the Minnesota men and women are ranked ninth in the nation, while Purdue’s men are No. 15 and their women are unranked. Both Minnesota teams are coming off impressive victories, and the women are the defending Big Ten champions. Meanwhile, the Purdue men come in rested after an idle weekend following their 208-90 win over Michigan State on Jan. 17, and the women are trying to rebound from a 210-159 loss to No. 13-ranked Indiana last weekend. Illinois is unranked but holds a 5-1 dual-meet record after their 219-81 win over Illinois State last Sunday.
“Minnesota’s obviously a great team, and I think they’re probably going to be our toughest competition there,” Peak said. “But we have swimmers here that are neck and neck with their best swimmers too, so there are going to be some really good races.”
Clearly, the Badgers know what is ahead of them this weekend. The competition will be fierce, but the teams are ready.
“Although it sounds like we don’t put a lot of emphasis on dual meets, when we get to the blocks, we want to race hard,” Hansen said. “The day of the meet — game on.”
