When asked what he wants to see from his swimming team for the first tournament of the season, ISU coach Duane Sorenson simply said, “We want to see all season-best times.”

The ISU swimming and diving team will travel to Evanston, Ill., on Friday for the Northwestern Invitational after a two-week layoff.

“This has been our hardest two weeks of training of the season,” Sorenson said. “We’ve been doing a lot more quality swimming in practice, we’ve been giving them standup sets where we give them a lot of rest, but we ask them to perform at a very high level.”

The tournament will be hosted by Northwestern and feature Illinois, Cleveland State, Nebraska and Iowa State.

“We have to compete,” Sorenson said. “[The other teams] all have good swimmers, so we want our kids to get up and race.”

In diving, the Cyclones will be led by senior captain Sarah Nelson and redshirt sophomore Jessica Nicholson, who both continue to be the best divers on the team.

“I expect to see them attacking their dives,” said diving coach Jeff Warrick. “We don’t have our easy dives anymore, so we need to be attacking and really getting after it.”

Iowa State is 3-1 in dual meets with its only blemish coming from a loss to Minnesota. But this will be the team’s first test of the season against multiple competition.

“We are really excited to go to Northwestern,” Nelson said. “It gives us a chance to compete against a lot of different teams, and its similar to the atmosphere of conference meet and other big meets, so it’s definitely good practice.”