Swimming and Diving

This Thursday, Northwestern will be on the road against Wisconsin. The Badgers rank ahead of No. 21 NU, according to the most recent poll by the College Swimming Coaches Association of America, with the Badgers at No. 13.

Coming off of a recent loss to Missouri, coach Jarod Schroeder noted comparisons with last weekend’s events as the Cats prepare for another highly competitive meet.

“Wisconsin is a really good team, so they won’t be any easier than Missouri was,” Schroeder said. “For us the main thing is to go up there and challenge them the same as we did against Missouri. We need to go and try to raise the level of competitiveness in a setting that matters.”

Wisconsin is 3-2 so far this season and is coming off of two recent losses to California schools. However, the Badger’s relatively high rank on the CSCAA poll indicates the strength of the program.

“They don’t have any weakness,” Schroeder said. “That’s going to be the tough thing to overcome. When I do the calculations though, we match up pretty well in some of events. If we can end up on the winning end of those events, I think we got a shot at beating them.”

Despite an expected strong performance from Wisconsin, Northwestern feels confident in its diving base to set a foundation for points.

“Wisconsin has a lot of depth,” junior captain Van Donkersgoed said, “but I think we can certainly see eight events we can definitely win. And all we need after that is one or two more events to go our way. It’s going to to be close, but they don’t have a lot of depth in diving. So we can easily go in and start 20 points ahead with what we can accumulate from the diving competitions. If we do what we know we can do, we can beat them.”

The Wildcats are hoping to change the precedent pattern of results when facing Wisconsin this week.

“If we can beat them on the road, that would be a big thing for our program,” Schroeder said. “It’s kind of interesting, if you look at the last four years that we’ve swum Wisconsin, and they come to our pool, we beat them. And when we go to their pool, they beat us. I’d love to see a change in that.”

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