Ashland University’s swimming and diving teams, though in the middle of preseason, are ready to start their season.

Ron Allen, who is in his third season as the head men’s and women’s swimming and diving coach, said that he is looking forward to improving this season.

“Performance wise, we’re looking to try to move up a spot in conference,” Allen said. “The men’s side, they’re trying to beat Saginaw Valley and it’s honestly a pretty good goal on the women’s side as well.”

Allen is very confident in the transfers and the recruiting class. This year marks the largest number of international students that are on Allen’s team with two different Brazilian transfers, one male and one female, a young man who is currently on the international team for Albania as a freshman and a male who has a dual citizenship from Greece.

“Transfers and those international kids are going to make a big difference right now, but we have several true freshmen coming in that are going to be high-impact people too,” Allen said.

Unlike a lot of programs, Allen’s approach to swimming techniques revolves around science. He uses a blood lactate analyzer and a velocity meter, both found in the Olympic Training Center.

The analyzer takes a sample of the swimmer’s blood to determine their aerobic and anaerobic speeds. This helps Allen know if he is under or over-training his team.

The velocity meter measures the swimmer’s speed while underwater. A graph shows how fast that swimmer is going, so fixing small hand changes to improve a score is easier for Allen to do.

“I’ve had a lot of good experiences with this. A lot of people, especially with the velocity meter have a lot of ‘a – ha’ moments,” Allen said. “I wasn’t sure if I felt it, but now I can see it.”

Another tactic Allen uses to get his team ready for conference and national meets is not resting his swimmers before meets, like most schools do.

“I would say at least 70 percent of college teams rest at some time in the season,” Allen said. “A good example is when we go to the three day Kenyon Invite, a lot of the teams there will have some kind of a rest going into that meet. We’ll be training pretty well through that.”

This season’s captains for the men are: Keegan Goeke, Matthew Bernsdorf, Grant Stahl and Aaron Bradfield, and for the women: Sophie Brightman, Julia Grady and Erin Staley.

The Eagles diving program is trying to make a name for themselves by rebuilding their program this season and want people to know that any students who are interested and have a gymnastics or diving background should contact the president of swim club, Jared Deeds.

Olivia Olesiak is in her second year as the graduate assistant for the swim team and is also the diving coach for the Eagles. She is going for her master’s degree in exercise science during her time at AU.

“We are restarting our diving program,” Olesiak said. “I’m getting the word out there that we have a program: contacting coaches, talking to recruits, trying to get people on campus to come and see our pool and facilities.”

The AU diving team has two athletes, freshman Byron Mayo and junior Madeline Cronin, but anyone who can join will immediately make an impact.

“Our goal is getting six to eight divers in the next couple years so we’re working up to those numbers, but it takes connections and networking to get the word out there that we have a program,” Olesiak said.

Ashland high school’s diving coach volunteered at AU as the dive coach, but had to leave due to the lack of pay and the fact that she had a busy life.

“We used to have a dive team, I want to say it was around ten years ago; we had four or five divers,” Olesiak said. “Since then, they haven’t been able to keep a coach, just because it wasn’t a paid position. When Ron took over the swim team, one of his first steps was to make diving a priority and we’re going to get that back up and running.”

Students interested in joining the diving team should contact Olesiak at [email protected].

“We’re trying to build a culture here,” Allen said. “So when you bring in 15 new people, it will change the team and we will have a larger recruiting class over the next couple of years so that’s a lot of it: making sure that we’re continuing to build a quality culture along the way.”

The Eagles will kick off their season at home in the annual Purple/Gold Intersquad Alumni meet on Saturday (Sept. 22) as a part of the homecoming festivities.