The Panthers are without Marlise Davidson.

The senior from Clearwater, Fla., has used her four years of swimming eligibility and Eastern will have to compete without Davidson, one of the top swimmers in the conference.

Davidson, who has played rugby for four years and ran track for a year will graduate in May. For this year’s swim team, it means replacing a vital team member.

“She was a solid person,” Eastern head coach Ray Padovan said. “I depended on her to be right there and we depended on her and Brittany (Wininger, who graduated in the spring) to get first places. (Having them) made it easier. We hope someone else steps up and tries to do the same thing (this year).”

The women’s swimming and diving team travels to swim at 5:30 p.m. on Friday in Indianapolis against IUPUI.

“With the women’s team we lost a lot (of swimmers), including Marlise,” Padovan said. Another key person that we lost was Brittany Wininger. We lost four other seniors so we lost some depth that helped us a lot. It’s not easy to replace, but we have some people that need to fill voids and our returning people need to get better every year.”

Davidson led EIU at the Mid-Continent Conference Championships (now the Summit League) and won the 200-meter freestyle with a time of 1 minute, 53.58 seconds, which is an Eastern record. She was a four-time Mid-Con Athlete of the Week. She had 19 first-place finishes.

The Panthers also lost Megan Frawley, Kristin McCoy, Megan Sobecki and Erica Stotts.

Padovan, entering his 41st year as Eastern’s head coach, said it is difficult to say if the team will be affected by the loss of his seniors.

Senior Jen Beresheim said she will miss the seniors but insists the team has a different focus this year.

“They were extremely strong competitors on our team,” Beresheim said. “So far this year we’ve had our practices intensify from last year. We’re getting more yards in earlier this season. We are stepping up and putting our hearts into it. Basically our relays will have to step it up to get some of those points back. (There’s) going to be a lot of changes.”

This year, the team needed to do some rebuilding so it brought in five freshmen to fill the void left by last year’s seniors.

“[We have] five freshman, and it is a smaller group,” Padovan said. “It wasn’t a major addition, but we picked up two backstroke people and a girl came in for butterfly. We have four pretty solid people and we have another fairly solid breaststroker. We’re not as deep as a year ago but that can change.”

Brittany Bart, Laura Gibson, Alyssa Lehman, Sofia Pappanastos and Megan Eshleman make up the class of 2011.

“I think they know what we expect, we lost a really good class last year,” Beresheim said. “We have five new girls and every day at practice they realize how intense our practices are.”

Beresheim said she is excited about sophomore Kellie Logterman who transferred from Rock Valley College in Rockford.

“(She) knows what she needs to do on the team as far as stepping it up from last year,” Beresheim said.

A top returning swimmer is sophomore Lauren Zillmer, a sprinter and also the distance specialists all must fill the void.

“Lauren Zillmer is a good sprinter and Jones, Immel and Lelo are the distance swimmers,” sophomore Patty Young said. “They push each other and have really close times (in distance events.)”