Eastern swimming struggled to compete with Saint Louis as the women’s team lost 134-75, while the men’s squad lost 132-77.

The teams won a combined three out of 24 races with the men taking two of those victories.

Kaylee Morris won the 100-yard freestyle for the women. For the men, Brogan O’Doherty won the 100-yard backstroke and Harris Thompson won the 500-yard freestyle.

Saint Louis won the first 14 events that dug the Panthers into a deep hole. Although Eastern was getting beat, the Panthers did their best to keep spirits up, Eastern coach Elliott McGill said.

“I liked our team energy on deck, even though the meet was a struggle,” McGill said. “That’s hard to do when you’re getting beat halfway through the meet. The team really kept the energy high, and they led us to a fairly stronger last half of the meet.”

McGill said he noticed that the teams seemed tired because of a lot of hard work being put in prior to the meet. However, McGill thought the team did a decent job overall.

“We swam tired,” McGill said. “We’ve been training hard the last few weeks, and a lot of the wear and tear caught up with us. That being said, we had decent swims all around.”

Going in with high expectations, Eastern was unable to perform up to the expectations it set. The teams will have to learn from this experience and try to get better from it, McGill said.

“We didn’t swim up to our expectations, for sure,” he said. “You’re going to have meets like that every now and then. For us, we are going to watch film, address what we need to work on and move on.”

The Panthers have very young teams this year with 16 freshmen between the men and women. McGill noticed the younger swimmers were not used to the high level of competition that is presented by many college swimmers.

“I think they learned that the level of competition has been raised and you are now racing against grown men and women,” McGill said. “You have to mature in your approach to each set, practice and meet in order to compete with people who are physically more mature than you.”

The Panthers will now have to go back to work to improve upon this performance, McGill said.

“For right now, we are going to focus on the details and applying them to practice,” McGill said. “Once we get those habits established, our racing will really come around.”

The women now stand at 1-1 after two meets, while the men start off their season at 0-1.

Dan Hildebrandt can be reached at 581-2812 or djhildebrandt@eiu.edu.