The Hawkeye swimming and diving teams will host ranked Michigan and Denver this weekend.

It will be a two-day competition at the Campus Recreation & Wellness Center. Day 1 competition starts at 6 p.m. today, and Day 2 will start at 10 a.m. Saturday.

The Michigan men come into this weekend’s competition ranked sixth, and the women Wolverines are ranked third.

But Iowa won’t let Michigan’s rank deflate its confidence.

“We make sure we go into every meet with confidence,” junior Joe Myhre said. “We know they are a very powerful team. They have some elite swimmers, but we tell ourselves we have elite swimmers, too. We are hard workers that put in the work and know what it takes. We just go and give it our best every meet.”

Myhre and the rest of the Iowa men’s team want to move past the narrow loss it had last week to Minnesota. Myhre led the Iowa freestyle team last week with a win in the 100 free (44.27) and a second-place finish in the 50 free (19.99). The Hawkeyes had a chance to defeat Minnesota in points in the last relay but could not pull off the victory in the 400 free.

“It really came down to the last relay,” Myhre said. “We were putting together a really good fight the entire meet. I think it is going to be really easy for us to bounce back. We can point out a lot of strengths we had as a team. We had a lot of really good swims early in the season, and we have been training hard. We are going to take all of that and find the positives out of it.”

Taking on Michigan is going to be a bigger test than last weekend, but Iowa has been preparing for the ranked opponent.

“We set some team goals that are not really time-based,” sophomore Sage Ohlensehlen said. “It is more based on cheering as loud as we can, having 10 touch-outs throughout the meet and stuff like that. They are goals that are easier to work on that are not performance based. We really come together as a team when we focus on those. We also have a team meeting where we talk about the importance of each event, where it is possible to score more points, and where we can improve in our lineup.”

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The things Iowa does at this point, both in practice and in meets, is to set it up for peak meets in February and March. The Hawkeyes are not relying on any individual swimmer at this point in the season to carry the team. All the swimmers and divers have been more focused on positioning themselves to be a key part of the team.

“We train to race, so we want to make sure they are in the position to race with top talent coming in here,” head coach Marc Long said. “Everyone has a key part to this meet. We are swimming an expanded amount of relay, four instead of the two, and other events that are not typically in a dual meet to give our swimmers more opportunities. We are excited for everybody.”

Hopefully for Iowa, the tough loss last week and the tough training this week will be enough motivation. The Hawkeyes want to show their talent this weekend and what could be better than doing it against the reigning Big Ten champions?