The San Diego State women’s swimming team put up its best effort,according to team captain, senior Hannah Ryan – but it wasn’t enoughto get a win in Utah. SDSU lost 133-98 against Utah on Friday and177-123 against BYU Saturday.
Although the Aztecs didn’t win, they still feel they performedtheir best according to the circumstances of the previous week – thefires and the lack of sufficient practice.
“Wedefinitely put forth great effort,” Ryan said. “We did the best wecould. Everyone was happy in some way of how the meet came out.”
Said head coach Deena Schmidt: “We, of course, prefer to win, butwe swam the best we could.”
The Utes and BYU are both good, fast teams, and SDSU went inknowing that it had to put up a fight for the win.
Looking back at the meet, the Aztecs can see what they need towork on throughout the remainder of the season. According to Ryan,what hurt them the most was their sprints, which are shorter distanceevents ranging from 50 to 100 yards.
“We don’t have a lot of depth,” Ryan said.
What more, out of a team of 19, there are only two divers. Thishas caused a minor setback while they are continuing to build uptheir diving team. But according to the captians, there is continuingimprovement.
Despite their weaknesses, Ryan believes that the team has a lot ofstrengths such as in the middle distance events (around 200 yards)and their distance events (ranging from 500 to 1000 yards).
This was on display against BYU. In the 200 freestyle, Ryan camein second place in 1:56.02 while Stephanie Chambers came in third in1:57.81.
Schmidt feels the butterfliers were very strong which – anassertion proven by Megan Storey’s performance. The senior came infirst place in the 200 yard butterfly at 2:11.86.
And as SDSU looks to improve upon its weaknesses, it continues towork together to get the job done.
“We are a goal-oriented team,” Ryan continues. “A lot of themembers are looking to excel and everyone is putting forth goodeffort.”
Schmidt said she is proud of her whole team, but she wasparticularly proud of Caitlin Friedhoff who came in first in both the50-and 100-yard freestyle with a time of 24.67 seconds and 53.45seconds in the BYU meet.
Just because they didn’t win this meet doesn’t mean the Aztecs arelosing faith. “We’re keeping a very positive outlook for the rest ofthe season,” Ryan said. “We have a home meet this weekend against NewMexico (Nov. 15). We’re looking forward to going out there andwinning.”
