This weekend marks the end of the Ivy League swimming and diving regular season and the Yale men’s (9-2, 5-2 EISL) and women’s (8-3, 3-3) teams are hoping they can rebound from last week’s disappointments to finish on a high note.
Despite tough team losses to Harvard and Princeton at the H-Y-P meet last weekend, both Bulldog teams were pleased with various individual performances.
“Of course we didn’t like getting hammered score-wise,” said head coach Frank Keefe of his teams’ performances at the H-Y-P meet. “But we had great individual swims, which is what’s really important.”
Principle among those swims were the school-record-setting swims by Paige Harazin ’04 in the 200 freestyle and Jimmy Veazey ’04 in the 200 butterfly. Additionally, Katherine McKeon ’04 anchored a strong Yale diving contingent with her impressive victory on the 1-meter springboard.
“Our goals don’t really focus around what the rest of the league does — it’s all about how we perform together as a team,” Harazin said.
At this point in the season, the Yale teams are performing well.
“It was a tough meet,” James Cocks ’03 said. “We fought hard, and most of us swam season, if not lifetime, best times in all of our races.”
This week, the Bulldogs have been preparing for a challenging meet, their last of the season, at Brown, where the men will face both Brown and Columbia in a double dual meet and the women will face host Brown.
In the wake of great swimming at the H-Y-P meet, both teams are optimistic about their chances to end the regular season on a positive note, especially with several weeks of training — mainly focused on the technical aspects of race strategy — and no competitions remaining before their respective conference championship meets at the end of February and early March.
“It is always a tough meet, since it comes right after the H-Y-P meet,” Harazin said.