The Eastern men’s and women’s swim teams will host Ball State at 6 p.m. Friday at Padovan Pool for their first home meet of the season.

The men and women both look to bounce back after losses in their first meets of the season. The Eastern men and women lost to IUPUI, while the women also lost to Butler in the same meet.

Ball State is coming in off losses against Bowling Green and Akron, respectively.

Eastern coach Jacqueline Michalski said that the Panthers would have an extra boost of energy, swimming at home for the first time this season.

“Everybody is really excited about the meet, it should have some good races and hopefully some good competition,” Michalski said.

Eastern assistant coach Rachel McGrath is also looking forward to the first home meet.

“I’m excited to see the excitement on deck and everything, I think they’re really excited to swim in the pool they practice in,” McGrath said.

Michalski said that having the athletes’ parents there to watch would add some excitement to the races.

Both coaches were happy with how things went in the first meet, but there are things that the team needs to touch up on.

Michalski said that the team has specifically worked on their turns in practice. She said that they had a hard time off the wall at IUPUI.

The team has also been focusing on quality in practice and having racing mentality.

This meet will be different than the last meet, with new races, and different swimmers competing in different races. Mostly all of the swimmers are swimming in a different race than what they did on Oct. 17, in Indianapolis.

There will also be swimmers competing in their first meet of the season on Friday.

This time there is 100’s of stoke and shorter relays where the first time there were longer races.

Both coaches expect to see improvements across the board in all races against Ball State.

For the women’s side of the races, Michalski said that Ball State has a lot of depth, which will be the hardest thing for the Panthers to deal with because they are short on a couple women who are ill.

On the men’s side she expects really close races and it’s just going to depend on who gets their hand on the wall first.

The meet will start with the women’s races at 6 p.m. with the men’s side of things following shortly after.

Sean Hastings can be reached at 581-2812 or smhastings@eiu.edu.