What's happening with the HOGS this week?

Our first meet and other fun

This Friday the Ladybacks finally got their feet wet with the first meet. We were very happy to welcome Drury University to Fayetteville for our season opener. Drury is the reigning Division II runner-ups and they brought two national champions with them. Our team was certainly ready for the challenge and opened up with a bang. We had great swims from almost everyone and the divers were very dominant on both boards. For full results, click here.

The most impressive aspect of the meet was the team unity and attitude. This year we have concentrated on sharing responsibility for each other’s success. When any one athlete does well, all the others take pride in what they have done to help create that success. This was very evident Friday night as our success in the early events became very contagious for the

Sarah Moll’s 200 Fly

duration of the meet. One of the most impressive performances was sophomore Sarah Moll’s life-time best in the 200 fly. Congratulations Sarah!

Following the meet, we had a team dinner and were pleased to have many of our parents there with us. It was a great time to have our parents get acquainted with each other and to start organizing traveling groups for our away meets.

Emily Gregory in a hole

This week was exciting as we were preparing to compete. We kept the yardage up but were really concentrating on our technique. We did a lot of starts, turns, relay starts and finishes. The sprinters continue to pound the breath control and lactate sets. Their intensity remained high and it seemed to payoff in the meet.

The middle distance did a lot of strategic training with goal splits and stroke counts. This also translated well into our meet and we continue to be optimistic about our future success with this.

Our distance training took the week off with pace training and mostly concentrated on over-distance training.

Finally, we had lots of fun over the weekend with a trip to a local state park called Devil’s Den. This park is about 20 minutes south of the campus and is a beautiful place to hike, swim, camp and even go caving. A group of swimmers and some friends spent the a few hours there and saw a bunch of the caves. As we didn’t come prepared to go in very far, we mostly explored the entrances. As our hike continued on, our girls did find a cliff to climb. Once on top, they did the famous Arkansas “Hog Call” for everyone in a ten mile radius to enjoy! It was a great time and one that we are eager to repeat.

Charlies Angels in Devil’s Den

Personal notes:

Coach Benji DeMotte will be traveling to Seattle this week for recruiting.

Good luck to Tori Kennedy as she is now safely in Brazil and getting ready to compete in Age Group World Championships.

Check back next week to see what’s happening with the H2OGS!