The Eastern women’s swim team routed the Western Illinois Leathernecks 146-57, while the men’s team came up five points shy of a victory, losing 105-100, Friday at Padovan Pool.

The women and men both swam well on Friday with the women winning all but one of their events and the men winning five out of 11 events.

Eastern coach Elliot McGill said he liked the effort the Panthers put into each event.

“Our women won every event but one and our men won five out of the nine individual events,” McGill said. “You don’t do that without trying hard.”

The men, still yet to win on the season, were close to putting a one in the win column. With this meet being the closest loss of the season, the Panthers have showed improvement, McGill said.

“Losing by that close always stings a little bit,” McGill said. “But at the end of the day, we had too many positives to let our focus stray towards the loss and not our individual performances.”

Compared to the meet against Ball State on Jan. 18, Eastern showed a lot of improvement in the pool against the Leathernecks on Friday. A lot of the Panthers’ times improved and they won more events this time around.

McGill said he was pleased with his team’s performance. The Panthers’ added passion seemed to light a fire inside the team.

“I thought we performed pretty well,” McGill said. “We looked a lot better and had better times than last week. Our energy and passion on deck was awesome and that really carried us in the pool.”

Any coach wants to see improvement out of his or her team and McGill is no different. McGill said he only had one thing he wanted to see his Panthers take away from this meet.

“That we are getting faster each week leading up to conference,” he said. “That’s all we can really control.”

Eastern only has one more regular season meet this season. Saint Louis will come to visit the Panthers at Padovan Pool for a rematch from earlier this season. Both the Panther men and women lost when the team traveled to St. Louis back in October.

The Panthers will take on the Billikens at 5 p.m. Friday at Padovan Pool.

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