(Photo: Blake Benard/WCSN)
While Arizona State’s campus may have been deserted for last few weeks, the Sun Devil swim team remained hard at work trying to get better for the second half of the swim season.
Heading into December, the women’s team had a 2-3 record, and the men’s team had a 2-2 record with a strong performance at the Art Adamson Invitational. Since the teams didn’t have a meet in December, they focused on intense training every day.
“Winter training was a great opportunity to sling-shot us forward,” sophomore Patrick Park said. “It’s a new year and new team. I think it will hold a lot of great things for us.”
According to the swimmers, they participated in their annual six week block. For that duration, they practiced in the water at least twice a day and had dryland workouts for muscle building.
“It was time to put our heads down and grind,” junior Alysha Bush said. “All we did was swim. We swam, slept, ate, came back to pool and swam again. It was a good mid-season thing to do. We got the work in and now we can start going downhill.”
The focus of this long training period is to get a swimmer in the best shape possible, and that showed at Monday’s practice. Everyone’s technique looked like it improved under Bob Bowman’s coaching and speed of the workouts were a lot faster.
Now, ASU needs to direct all of its focus to the latter half of the season. The next two months consist of swim meets every week, especially in the next three weeks when they face their toughest opponents in Stanford, California and Arizona. This stretch will lead up to the conference and national championships in the spring.
Since ASU hasn’t had a meet in long time, the team is excited and eager to get back to racing, and the first meet of the new year is this Saturday against Wyoming.
“I can’t wait to race,” Park said. “We’ve had a month and a half slump where we have just been training. Now we are hungry and we are hoping to be competitive.”
The “new year new team” mentality will propel ASU forward. All season long the swimmers said they want to swim with a chip on their shoulder and make a statement in collegiate swimming.
“We got a lot closer as a team over winter break,” Bush said. “We are coming out with different dynamic, and we are excited to see what’s going to happen after the work we put in this winter.”
