Coming off hard losses in its home openers last weekend at the Big 12 Relays and a dual meet against Texas A&M, the ISU swimming and diving team hopes to continue to improve in its meet Saturday at South Dakota State University.

“We’re always looking to improve and finding where everyone’s weaknesses are and we saw a lot of glaring weaknesses in a number of different people last weekend,” said head coach Duane Sorenson. “It’s just a matter of concentration and being nervous in the first competitions . We also then had some individual freshmen who did really well, but this whole season is just a matter of trying to get better every time we get in the water.”

One freshman swimmer who did very well last weekend was Angelica Nixt, who recorded a lifetime best in the 800-meter medley relay. For Nixt, this weekend is about growing individually and as a team.

“Hopefully I’ll just keep improving from what I did last weekend, either gaining the best time or hitting what I did last weekend,” Nixt said. “I was surprised we didn’t earn the points needed to win last weekend, but I think we need to step it up even more and just need to get that final push to get there.”

This weekend is a great opportunity to train and bolster confidence because the meet is not against other Big 12 schools, but a SDSU program that is just attempting to reach Division I status.

“They’re not at our level, obviously, and that’s why we can swim off events in this meet,” Sorenson said. “But they are moving into D1, so it’s another opportunity for them to move up and race against some higher competition.”

To further continue improvement, the swimming and diving team will be changing things up and trying new things.

“We’re switching a lot of our women around into different events just to see how they do,” Sorenson said. “For example, individual medley swimmers will not only be swimming events that they don’t normally swim, but events that will help them in their individual medley races as well. It’s an opportunity to stand up and race again in events they’ve never done and we’re really looking for people to compete more than anything else.”

The swimmers won’t be the only ones mixing it up. While the divers don’t have other events to try, they can use the meet as opportunity to add to their repertoire of dives.

“Overall, we’re going to see some dives that they didn’t do last weekend,” said diving coach Jeff Warrick. “We’re trying out some new dives and we’ll see how that goes. I’m hoping we’re going to see some better scores than what we did last week, which, when compared to some of their scores from last year, they were pretty low, so that’s what we’re shooting for, just to do a lot better.”