Feb. 1, 2013
LEXINGTON, Ky. – The Kentucky swimming and diving teams will head north up I-75 Saturday for their final regular season dual meet at the University of Cincinnati. Diving events will begin at 11 a.m. at the Keating Aquatics Center, and swimming events will start at 1 p.m.
Saturday’s meet will be UK’s final tune-up before the Southeastern Conference Championships beginning Feb. 19 in College Station, Texas, on the campus of Texas A&M. Kentucky will use this meet to prepare for its postseason competition.
“One of the big things we’re looking for is to finalize our SEC squad,” said UK swimming head coach Gary Connelly. “That’s pretty obvious on the women’s side, but we’ve got a couple of issues on the men’s side. We need to see something that makes the last two or three choices standout.”
The Wildcats will look to build off the momentum of several strong performances from the past weekend against the University of Louisville.
In their final home meet of the season, UK’s men’s and women’s teams made great strides and swam their best meet of the season while nearly pulling off upsets over U of L.
“We seem to be doing pretty good things in practice in combination with doing good things in meets, so I feel pretty good about our shot at the SEC Championships,” said Conelly. “If we come out of the Cincinnati meet and feel more or less like we did in the Louisville meet, we’ll be headed in the right direction.”
Out of a total of 129 swims last weekend, UK men and women earned 23 career-best times, 40 UK-best times, 60 season-best times, and 81 dual meet-best times in their most productive competition of the year.
The Kentucky divers will look to continue to improve on a dominating performance over Louisville, which played a huge part in UK’s upset bid against the Cardinals. Kentucky’s men took first, second, and third place in both the 1-meter and 3-meter springboard events. The women earned first and third place in both events as well.
The Cats will be down their top-male diver in junior Greg Ferrucci who continues to nurse an injured thumb, but they look forward to the challenge of performing without him for the second straight weekend.
“We upped the training this week and have gone hard so we’ll see how they respond on tired legs,” said UK head diving coach Ted Hautau. “The pool at Cincinnati is challenging from a lighting perspective as there are a lot of windows above the three meter level and it is pretty dark when you drop below that. This will be fun to see if we can hit dives in there.”
Kentucky and Cincinnati will start the meet at 11 a.m. where they will complete all of the diving events.
Check back in to UKAthletics.com Saturday afternoon for more information on the UK swimming and diving regular season finale.
