The smell of chlorine in the air and the sound of bodies slapping the water will soon be heard. The men’s and women’s swim teams are ready to make their splash this season.

This weekend, the men’s and women’s teams will have two dual meets against Louisville on Friday and Xavier on Saturday.

“These are two good teams and it will be close,” Parovan said. “With the women it’s going to be hard against Xavier but we should stay up with Louisville, and with the men it’s going to be a toss up in both meets.”

Last weekend, the swim teams had their first meet at the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) Invitational where the men placed first by beating second place Xavier by 20 points, and the women placed fourth out of six teams.

“It was kind of disappointing,” head coach Ray Padovan said. “We could have done better than we did.”

This year’s team is a very young, with 50 percent of the men’s team comprised of freshmen, and a little less than 50 percent of the women’s team being freshmen. With such young squads, both teams are still experimenting with the swimmers to see where each are best suited.

“We work our hardest all season long to conference at the end, where we want to win,” Padovan said.

With a long season, five and a half months, the process of improvement is a slow one. The team has to work hard and learn to give up things to focus on swimming Padovan said. They can’t back off their training even though there are meets every weekend he continued. Padovan said no matter how unpredictable the season might be, they have to keep work hard to achieve their goals.

The goal this year is to have everyone have a lifetime “best swim” at conference. Last year, 70 to 80 percent of the team achieved this goal but Padovan doubts they will ever get 100 percent of the swimmer breaking personal bests.

Even though swimming has a team score, it is very much an individual sport. To do the best it can, each team has several leaders that keep the team in line and focused. On the women’s team, Padovan said senior captain Jordan Sherbrooke helps the team by being very consistent, and sophomores Jenny Curry and Claire Garvey are doing what they can to help the team.

Lone male senior Rich Wahlgren and juniors Tom Watson and Paul Luttinen are showing the team that there is always room for improvement. On both teams, though, the returning swimmers need to get better and the new swimmers need to be able to interject their abilities into each meet Padovan said.

“Having a long season, we don’t need instant success,” he said. “We just need to improve throughout the season to reach our goal of winning the conference.”