A group of leaders who have gotten faster and better throughout their last four years with the ISU swimming and diving team will take the stage one last time at the Beyer Hall pool this weekend.

“A lot of jokes. A lot of laughing and teasing back and forth. That’s probably the biggest thing out of this class,” ISU coach Duane Sorenson said of the seniors. “It’s been a fun group to see grow up from the recruiting process to where they are now.”

This weekend the seniors will take on Kansas for their last go-around at Beyer Hall pool. Many memories have been made and a lot of hard work has been done in Iowa State’s home pool, but the thing that defines this senior class goes beyond swimming.

Sorenson said many of the seniors have developed great friendships with each other. In fact, four of the senior swimmers living together. Alex Gustafson, Emily Wiltsie, Hayley Krzeczowski and Katie Vollhaber are teammates as well as roommates.

“Every year [the four girls who live together] take a Christmas photo. They’ve always had sweaters on, so I accused them of raiding their mom’s and grandmother’s closets to get these sweaters,” Sorenson said. “The standard joke has become, ‘You’re turning into your mom.’”

When this year’s seniors were freshmen, Sorenson said he wouldn’t have thought they could’ve led the ISU swimming and diving team, but now after watching each of them progress and grow up, they are doing a good job of doing it.

“[The seniors] are really mature and they really understand what Division I swimming is all about,” Sorenson said.

But it wasn’t always that way. Wiltsie said her freshman year, she was “pretty clueless.”

“I know we said a lot, you go in and they expect you to know what you’re doing and you have no idea,” Wiltsie said. “As you get older, you’re like ‘Okay, I know what I’m doing.’ You just have a lot more knowledge.”

Sorenson also described this senior class as “very engaged.”

“They’re probably the generation that really got into the Snapchat and a lot of the tweets,” Sorenson said. “They’re the first group to come through that have done a lot of that. They’re very socially connected. It’s brought them closer. They always know what each other is doing.”

On Twitter and other online schedules, Feb. 8 marks the seniors’ last swim at Beyer Hall pool and many of them believe it will be emotional and a little surreal.

“It will be sad to leave Beyer,” Vollhaber said. “It will be kind of bittersweet to have our last race here in Beyer, but it will also be fun to be able to celebrate and swim with our teammates and have a good meet with Kansas because they’re pretty big competitors of ours.”

Iowa State has a ritual of getting together in the locker room before each meet to do cheers and sing the ISU fight song in the shower area to pump up one another. They will sing the fight song one last time before stepping onto the pool deck.

The Cyclones want to go out with a bang and getting a win against Kansas would give them momentum going into Big 12 Championship action. Events will begin at 6 p.m. Feb. 7 and 10 a.m. Feb. 8.

“It’s a very special day, something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives,” Sorenson said.