Over winter break, the Eastern men’s and women’s swimming team attended the Ft. Lauderdale College Swim Forum for team practices and a relay meet. This forum was for swimmers to train their endurance and participate in long-distance practices.

“The meet went well,” senior Tim O’Hagan said. “There’s a lot of fast teams there from around the country. It was a relay meet, and we placed well in a few events.”

O’Hagan said the team practices were tiring but it was good to get a meet in during the break. He said the team’s main goal was to use the meet and practices to get back in shape after some time off.

“For the men’s team, our butterfly was really good and our Medley relay team was not bad either,” freshman Matt Scaliatine said. “Going down there and practicing in a 50-meter pool and getting our endurance up for the last few meets of the season was important.”

The meet also focused on training, in which there were lots of practices including some that were in between the meet.

“The meet is more training for us,” junior Brent Noble said. “We practice and focus on the training. We did long-course training, working on stroke technique and endurance.”

Team gearing up for the rest of the season:

The team has four meets left before conference, including tough challenges against Millikin, Indiana-Purdue-Indianapolis and Saint Louis, all at home. They begin this stretch of meets Friday against Millikin at Lantz Natatorium at 5:00 p.m. The teams are motivated from the early losses to conference opponents this season.

“We have four meets left, all of which are winnable, and we want to go in with confidence and win throughout the rest of the season,” O’Hagan said. “We dropped a couple of close meets and that motivates us to do well the rest of the year by facing IUPUI, Millikin and Saint Louis, because we don’t want to lose to those teams again.”

Eastern head coach Ray Padovan said he is looking at individual swimmers for the rest of the season when he makes his decisions for whom to put in the conference meet.

“We’re only allowed to take a certain amount of people to conference,” Padovan said. “Millikin will be a nice meet for us. They aren’t real strong this year and have a new coach. It gives me a lot of flexibility to put people in different events, because the next few weeks will be hard meets, so we can mix things up.”

Members of the swim team weigh in on Padovan’s departure:

Padovan, who has been coaching at Eastern for 42 years, is retiring at the end of the season from coaching. Many members of the team said they were sad to hear about Padovan’s departure, but were happy for him and excited about his successor.

“It’s sad that he’s leaving us, but we’re happy for him to be able to move on,” freshman Matt Scaliatine said. “We want to give him a top three finish at the conference meet as a send off.”

Veteran swimmers like Noble were also sad to see him go, but Noble said he thinks Padovan will leave the team in good hands.

The teams also want to do well at conference so Padovan can be given the “Coach of the Year” award at the conference meet.

“It will be hard with Ray retiring,” O’Hagan said. “He’s close to us, and for the seniors, we get to leave with him. Every year at conference there’s a ‘Coach of the Year’ award, so it’d be important for us to win that.”

Ross Meister can be reached at 581-7944 or at rwmeister@eiu.edu.

Freshman swimmer Matt Scaliatine practices the breast stroke during practice Monday afternoon in Lantz Natatorium. (Robbie Wroblewski/The Daily Eastern News)

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