Swimming & Diving Opens Home Slate vs. Tigers
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – The University of Miami swimming & diving team opens its home slate Friday afternoon with a meet against visiting Princeton at Gulliver Preparatory School.
The Hurricanes, who split a tri-meet with host Texas A&M and IWU last weekend in College Station, Texas, are looking to continue their momentum when action kicks off at 4 p.m.
Diving events will begin at 2:30 p.m. on the Miami-Dade College Kendall campus.
“It’s always great to be in our home area and competing,” head swimming coach Andy Kershaw said. “We’re going to still be protecting our turf. We definitely took steps forward in our last meet, which was great to see.”
Kershaw was encouraged by the performance of his team, which topped IWU 215-81 for its second dual meet victory and battled impressively against the Aggies, who have finished in the top 10 at the NCAA Championships each of the last nine seasons.
“They’re moving through the process, which is important,” said Kershaw, who was named USA Swimming’s head manager for the 2016 Olympics earlier this week. “We had a lot of our best performances of the year, and even if some of their overall times weren’t their fastest, the way they performed the race, the way they executed in almost every case, was better than we’ve been at any point this year. That was great to see, especially again against such challenging competition.”
Kershaw knows duplicating the positive results from a week ago against Princeton will be a challenge.
“Any time you swim a meet and you do well, and you have another meet a week later, it’s hard to put all that emotion in again,” he said. “But that’s the goal – one week later, step up and try to improve even more. That’s the challenge now.”
Miami divers Briadam Herrera and Carolyn “Cici” Chaney swept the ACC Diving awards this past week to continue the program’s upward trend this season.
The Tigers, under the direction of 32-year head coach Susan Teeter, will present a unique opportunity for both Kershaw and his Hurricanes.
“Princeton is an interesting team, and a difficult team to scout,” he said. “They’re always great at the end of the year. It’ll be interesting to see what we get from them tomorrow. They have one of the legendary coaches in Coach Teeter, so for me, it’s exciting to go against a great coach last week and another great coach this week.”
Anchored by a number of veterans leading the way, the Hurricanes have benefited from a number of younger contributors stepping up in recent weeks.
Freshmen Sydney Story and Madison Emery, as well as sophomore Jessica Hurley, are among those who Kershaw hopes continue their contributions.
“Our whole freshmen class has really taken a big step,” he said.
Miami will heavily rely on a number of veteran talents, including junior Angela Algee, senior captain My Fridell and sophomore Ksenia Yuskova, to top the Tigers Friday.
“I know the Tigers will be where Coach Teeter wants them to be,” Kershaw said. “They’ll perform their races well and perform with class, like they always do. As far as the meet’s outcome, this is why we swim them, and this is why we dive them. This one is a little harder to judge, but I’m confident our team will be ready to go.”
