The Sun Devils compete in a meet at home in Tempe. ASU was able to send two women athletes to the Beijing World Cup. (Photo by Diana Lustig).The ASU swim and dive team will kick off its season with two dual meets at home against Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The women's team sent two athletes, one swimmer and one diver, to the NCAA championships last season. This season, the team is looking forward to sending even more to NCAAs.
Senior Melanie Busch said the team is excited for the season and working toward a positive end.
“We have a lot of people coming off so pretty big meets at the end of the summer,” she said. “We’re just trying to keep that energy up and going throughout the season.”
The team focused on preparing the underclassmen for dual meets during the first few weeks of the season, Busch said. The dual meets are extremely important for the team and make up a majority of the season.
“We would like to be more competitive at the dual meets this season,” Busch said. “I think we can be more focused and more competitive with the other teams while we’re racing them at the meets.”
The Sun Devil women lost a majority of their dual meets last season and are working toward improving their aggressiveness this time around.
As a senior, Busch said she hopes to improve her speed in backstroke and freestyle and “throw down” some good times at the dual meets. Busch is one of 10 seniors on the women’s team this year.
On the men’s side, the Sun Devils sent three athletes to NCAA tournament last season and graduated many key contributors. There are only five upperclassmen on the team this season, and junior Thibaut Capitaine said they are working hard to focus on joining together as a whole.
“We want to work a lot on building the team together and having a very strong collective so we can get better as a team,” he said.
Capitaine said he is extremely confident with the team’s potential and believes the team will succeed this year. He said despite the large number of younger members, he and the team are not worried about lack of experience.
Coming off of a back injury last year, Capitaine said he is happy with his success thus far and is excited to continue to train with the team, even the underclassmen.
The men's team lost a majority of their dual meets last season just as the women did and the coaching staff is looking to improve the team’s plans for handling dual meets, Capitaine said.
He said although dual meets are very important to the season, the Pac-12 championships in early March are always on the team’s radar.
“It’s (Pac-12s) in a long time, but swimming is a sport that takes a long time to get ready for, and it’ll come up fast,” Capitaine said. “I’m always excited to race.”
The men and women’s diving team had a successful season last year. They graduated an extremely talented and successful diver, Riley McCormick after last season, but still have a lot of strong talents.
Sophomore Luke Clohessy joined the Sun Devils last semester and qualified for the NCAA championships after only a few months of competition.
Redshirt senior Hailey Casper placed 12th in the 1-meter and 14th in the 3-meter dives at last seasons NCAAs.
The Sun Devil’s season kicks off on Oct. 3 against Wisconsin at 1 p.m. and continues on Oct. 4 against Minnesota at 12 p.m. in Tempe.
Reach the reporter at Megan.Kavy@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @meggiekavy
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