The women’s swimming team’s record is at 1-7, which puts Eastern two meets away from the Summit League Conference meet.

Accordingly, the Panthers are looking to polish up their times and start performing their best at the end of the year.

The Panthers’ record is deceiving because in many of their meets they were close to winning. Eastern has lost its seven meets by an average of 40 points, but lost one meet by four points at its most recent against Valparaiso.

“Nothing is stopping us from winning,” said freshman Alyssa Lehman. “We’ve had really good competition in every meet we’ve had so far.”

The team has started to taper some in practice – a tactic used to rest up for the conference meet.

Preparation for the Indiana-Purdue-Indianapolis meet Saturday, however, has not featured rest.

“Our practices have been getting harder,” Lehman said. “We’ll all start tapering soon, and I think we’ll need to do well until the end of conference. Tapering is a decline of yardage, and by having not as many yards to swim, it helps us rest for conference.”

Senior Holly Hooe said practice has been normal, but the team has been swimming fewer yards.

“I think that at the end of the year.we’ll start resting for conference, so that will mean we will close that gap of the points not made up in those meets,” Hooe said.

Team feeling lack of depth, looks to underclassmen

Even though the women’s swim team hasn’t had that many injuries this year, it still finds itself having lack of depth due to inexperience and the loss of junior Nicole Srutowski.

“We’ve lost one swimmer due to nursing,” said head coach Ray Padovan. “We are thin in the women, depth-wise. For the end of the season we need to start coming around. (The IUPUI meet) is a meet that we need to swim well, because we haven’t swam well since the November Invitational. We’re tired from training.”

A swimmer hitting season-best or career-best times is a fairly common occurrence. Padovan said the women’s team would need to swim at this level for the final meets of the season.

“It is real important to have some solid swims,” Padovan said. “It is unusual if we get some life best swims later on in the year, but it seems to happen with the new people more, but not much with some of the older people.”

Since newer swimmers could break out and have life-best swim times, the team will look to its underclassmen in particular in the meets leading up to the Summit League Championship.

“The one person who started to come around was Lehman, where she broke out in the 200-yard backstroke,” Padovan said. “She had a four-second drop in her time and is in the area she needs to be. Also, Kellie Logterman missed some training from the Florida training. She swam some but not nearly as much, so she needs to do well in the sprint freestyle.”

Lehman swam her best time of the season in the 200-yard backstroke on Saturday at Valparaiso, taking second place with a time of two minutes, 14.89 seconds.

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