WKU men’s, women’s swimming sweep tri-meet in Atlanta
November 5, 2011
WKU swimming swept a tri-meet Friday in Atlanta against Atlantic Coast Conference schools Georgia Tech and Clemson.
The men’s team (2-1) and women’s team (3-1) were able to get two wins a piece after having to recover from a competition just last weekend.
Head Coach Bruce Marchionda said he was “extremely pleased” with the team’s effort on back-to-back weekends.
“Some of them were right at the time that they did last weekend and some of them were a little faster,” Marchionda said in a news release. “For them to get up two weekends back-to-back just showed a little bit of mental toughness which is something that we need to continue to work on.”
Nine different WKU swimmers were able to place first in their event and five of them were freshmen.
Marchionda said it’s the newcomers who are helping the program step up.
“It just makes the whole program that much more competitive which translates into everyone doing better,” he said. “They are definitely having an impact and we knew they were going to have an impact when we recruited them.”
It was freshman Allie Duff who was having an impact on this specific competition. Duff led the way for WKU with three event wins herself.
“Allie is just a tough competitor,” Marchionda said. “She doesn’t like to lose and she has that ability to be able to get up and swim fast when she is tired and because of that she has won a number of events for us over the last couple weekends.”
Freshman Loui Little and junior Luke Musser led the men’s team, winning two events a piece.
The WKU swim team will look to build upon its performance as the young season continues, including when the Toppers and Lady Toppers host the Hilltopper Invitational in two weeks.
“I think they realize that they can be competitive with anybody on our schedule,” Marchionda said. “And because of that I think we’ll have a chance to win every meet that we swim this year.”