Friday night marked the end of the regular season for the Eastern swimming program, as the men’s and women’s teams dropped their meet to the Saint Louis at Padovan Pool.

The men’s meet ended with a 200-60 win for the Billikens, while the women’s meet ended with a score of 170-92 in favor of Saint Louis.

Eastern began on a good note as the women won the first event of the day in the 200-yard medley relay. Despite the winning start, the women came up with only three more victories.

The men’s only event win came at the hands of sophomore Conner Conroy in the 200-yard butterfly.

The energy on the pool deck was lacking for the Panthers as they were having trouble coming up with event victories. Eastern coach Elliot McGill said the mental aspect during Friday’s meet led to unsuccessful races.

“We had a few solid individual performances, but as a whole we let how we were

feeling dictate our energy towards our races,” McGill said. “We are a young team that has to learn our mental and physical approach to a race can affect when we are feeling funky or tired at this time in the season.”

The men and women both ended up with losing records this season, as the men finished at 0-8 and the women finished 2-7.

Despite what the records show, Eastern put together a very solid season, McGill said.

The Panthers faced some very good competition throughout the season, which will help

them come the Summit League Championships in late February.

“We had no cupcakes on our schedule this season,” McGill said. “We took the approach of if you want to be the best, you have to compete against the best. We did and I thought even though we didn’t win very many meets we competed very well. That will only make us tougher and more ready for conference.”

With the regular season coming to an end Friday, the Panthers will only have one more meet to focus on – the Summit League Championships.

The Summit League Champions will be in Indianapolis on Feb. 19-22. This means the Panthers will have nearly three weeks until they compete again.

Some of the preparation for the Panthers will include a few tweaks to their practice schedule.

“We will be focusing on some skills we need to clean up and we will have a few raceoriented sets,” McGill said.

Besides the sets the teams will do in the pool, the rest of the time leading up to conference will all be time for resting.

“Outside of those few sets, the next two and a half weeks will all be rest,” McGill said.

“We will slowly go down in yards and intensity as we approach conference.”

Dan Hildebrandt can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]