As the winter sports season begins to wind down, teams at Iowa State enter the final few games and meets in hopes of better preparation for the end – the Big 12 Championships they have worked toward all season.

The ISU swimming and diving team is no different, as it prepares to face dominant Big 12 competitor Kansas this weekend at Beyer Gym in Ames in its final meet before the conference championships.

After coming off a meet of successful swimming that still ended in a disappointing loss to conference rival Nebraska last weekend, the Cyclones hope to pull out some of the positives from that meet and use them against Kansas.

“We actually swam quite well against Nebraska – they just swam outstanding, so props goes to them,” said coach Duane Sorenson. “One of the things we didn’t have was some very good starts, so we need to get a little bit more focused on our starts. The second half of the meet we got a few better starts, so we’ll hopefully do that same thing against Kansas – and hopefully have it down for Kansas.”

Diving coach Jeff Warrick agrees that, while last weekend’s meet didn’t turn out as the Cyclones had hoped, they are now able to improve from that weekend and fine tune.

And fine tuning for the Kansas meet this weekend will only further prepare them for what the team has been working toward – the meets at the end of the season.

“Both teams [Kansas and Iowa State] talked about what we need to do at this meet to get ready for the Big 12 championships, because that’s where everything is put on the line,” Sorenson said. “What ends up happening at this meet is we just want the girls to compete, and especially I want our swimmers to go out and compete and do our best and see where we match up – it’s something to do to get ready for the Big 12.”

The divers will be using a format that emulates the Big 12 championship style, going through preliminary dives this weekend to better prepare.

“We’re doing a different setup,” Warrick said, “where the divers will have a preliminary contest before the meet, so they will run through their six dives and the top three will come back and meet again. It gives them the feel of conference – simulating what conference will be like. We will see how it goes, how we approached it, and then fine tune for the next two weeks before Big 12.”

Regardless of how the meet ends up, the Cyclones are just looking for improvement against the Jayhawks and are only worrying about themselves at this point in the season.

“This weekend is just another weekend to just stand up and race and see where we are, the good and the bad, and keep working on little things so we can go into the Big 12 meet and have an upstanding performance,” Sorenson said. “We can only control how we swim and what we can do – we can’t control what the other team does, but we will just have to go out and give it our best.”

The meet starts at 6 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. Saturday.