This year, the team traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico for the first two weeks of winter break for intensive training. The team practiced outdoors and swam longer courses than usual, according to coach Jim Wilson.
"Everyone worked really hard and we put in a lot of yardage [on the trip]," co-captain Carolyn Rippe '10 said. "I can definitely see a difference in everyone's level of training right now."
Wilson added that the training trip gave the athletes a rare chance to focus exclusively on their sport without the usual academic conflicts.
On Saturday, the women are hoping to overtake the University of Vermont, who they defeated by 36 points last year at home.
"It will be a really fun meet to see our training trip work pay off," co-captain Catherine Armstrong '10 said. "We're going to see a lot of faster swimming than in the fall and we're hoping for a win."
Still, Wilson said that the Catamounts will present a challenge, especially with their home-pool advantage.
The men (1-3, 0-3 Ivy) and women will both compete against Boston University on Saturday, hoping to make up for last year's losses to the Terriers.
"We got a lot of longer yard practices over the training trip which helps build up our base more," co-captain Scott Sorensen '10 said. "[BU] is a team we can beat."
Sorensen added that the men's team is hoping to maintain its momentum from the previous meet against Colgate University, when it picked up its first win of the season with a 200-94 victory.
"With Colgate we really just came together as a team and really had some fire going," he said. "We just need to go into [the meet] thinking we can beat them and use that competitive fuel to swim as hard as we can."
The women are facing a particularly tough meet, as the BU women's team won the America East conference last year.
"We're going to try for good performances against [BU] and not necessarily worry about the score too much," Wilson said.
This year, the swimming and diving teams welcomed 16 freshmen who have enjoyed early successes in the first meets of their college careers, and several of the men's 11 rookies have already received several first-place finishes.
"Based on their performance this year, the freshmen have stepped up and become real team leaders," Wilson said. "They're really our bread and butter for the team right now."
Sorensen said that with the addition of these rookies, the future of the team is in good hands.
"We built a lot of great relationships over the break and now [the freshmen] feel much more at home," she said. "A lot of the nerves are gone because they already have some meets under their belts."
With over a month remaining until the Ivy League Championships, both the men's and women's teams have room to improve on their dual meet records, but Armstrong said that this will not affect their showing at the end of the season.
"The training trip gave us a preview of what we're capable of and it definitely gave us that base preparation to target our training for Ivies," she said.
