By Blake Dowson
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The eyes of the Big Ten swimming community will look toward Ann Arbor as the Iowa women’s swimming and diving team, along with the rest of the conference, heads to Michigan’s campus for the Big Ten Championships today through Saturday.
The Iowa women ended the Big Ten regular season with a 2-3 record, with wins coming against Michigan State and Illinois. The Hawkeyes finished the season 8-4 in dual meets.
The Hawkeyes will try to improve upon their performance at last season’s Big Tens, in which they placed eighth with 223 points.
However, with that eighth-place finish also came 10 school records and one in the diving well, something to strive for again this season.
Junior Emma Sougstad finished better than eighth in eight events at last year’s Big Tens, and she will try to be Iowa’s second individual champion in the last 15 years. Then-senior Becky Stoughton won the 1,650 freestyle last year, the first title for the Hawkeyes since 2001.
“It would mean so much to me to be a Big Ten champion, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it,” Sougstad said. “I love to represent my program, my teammates, and my God, so it’ll be a fun week to see what can happen.”
Iowa has four swimmers with top-10 times in the Big Ten in different events, including sophomore Meghan Lavelle in the 100 backstroke, senior Olivia Kabacinski in the 50 freestyle, freshman Kelly McNamara in the 100 butterfly, and Sougstad in four events.
The Hawkeye 200-medley relay of senior Allie Orvis, Sougstad, McNamara, and Kabacinski has the third-fastest time in the conference.
In the diving well, junior Lydia Lehnert will try to improve her sixth-place finish on the platform at the 2015 meet, in which she scored 292.40.
Kabacinski said the team feels confident heading to Ann Arbor and thinks the Hawks can make some noise in the pool before the week is over. She also said the championships will be a good opportunity for the senior class to give it one more go in the pool.
“With this being my last Big Tens, I have the mindset of having as much fun as possible and really giving it my all every single race,” Kabacinski said. “I’m excited to support my teammates at this meet. I think we could score more points than ever this year.”
Competition will get started today with the 200-medley relay and 800-freestyle relays.
Thursday will hold preliminaries in the morning for the 500 freestyle, 200 individual medley, 50 freestyle, and 1-meter diving. Thursday night will be devoted to the finals of the four events, as well as the 200-freestyle relay.
Friday morning preliminaries will include the 400 individual medley, 100 fly, 200 free, 100 breaststroke, 100 backstroke, and 3-meter diving. Continuing with the same format, finals for all six events will be held Friday night, along with the 400-medley relay.
The championships will wrap up on Saturday, with the preliminaries and finals of the 200 back, 100 free, 200 breast, 200 fly, 1,650 free, 400-free relay, and platform diving.
“It’ll be a fun week with a great group of very talented girls,” Sougstad said. “I think exciting things will happen for us in Ann Arbor.”
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