After a great performance from the men’s and women’s swimming teams last Saturday, the Panthers had a week to themselves to recover and get back in training mode for their next opponent.

Coach Jacqueline Michalski said the teams have increased their volume by increasing their yards.

“We made sure that we are kind of increasing our cardio base so that we have enough endurance to race,” Michalski said. “Next week, we’ll probably do a little bit more intensity work rather than endurance work.”

The teams right now are more focused on endurance since there is no meet this week. When there is a meet, the teams then move their focus towards the intensity side of things. Practices build up to the end of the season, which leads to the conference championship.

Junior Patrick Wood said the team is training hard this week with the time off and allows them to fix whatever weak points they saw from the first meet.

“The time off allows us to fix any stroke technique, tweak any race strategies,” Wood said. “Building up the habits of the corrections made, having a better race plan, and some more endurance and speed from the hard week of training will allow us to progress forward at the next meet.”

Michalski emphasized the importance of in-season best times and actual best times. She used junior Brandon Robbins as an example.

“The faster you go in-season, usually correlates to having a faster time at the end of season,” Michalski said. “The amount of work Brandon is doing right now, coming to extra practices, extra gym sessions and going above and beyond and swimming even faster, our goal is that it correlates to a faster time in the end.”

Michalski said she wants to see the in-season times drop while the teams still work at a high level that leads up to the Summit League Conference championships.

The swim teams will be back in action on 6 p.m. Nov. 11 at the Padovan Pool facing Evansville.

Tyler McCluskey can be reached at 581-2812 or trmccluskey@eiu.edu.