W. Swimming views Dartmouth as chance for Ivy win No. 2

By the time you read this, the Penn women's swimming team will be on the road to proving itself. The Quakers (4-4, 1-3 Ivy) are scheduled to depart early this morning to make the long bus trip to chilly Hanover, N.H., where they will take on Dartmouth and Yale in a dual meet tomorrow at 2 p.m. at Dartmouth's ancient Karl Michael & Spaulding Pools. Penn has repeatedly pointed to tomorrow's meet with Dartmouth as its most important of the semester, due to the fact that the Big Green is its only remaining realistically beatable Ivy opponent. In their season opener on November 20 in Ithaca, the Quakers edged Cornell 153-145, giving them their first and only Ivy win of the year and ending what had been a dark age for the program -- a seven-year, 42-meet Ivy losing streak. Their last league win, also against Cornell, came in the 1992-93 season opener. But the Quakers don't want to stop at just one Ivy victory. They want No. 2. "It [another Ivy win] would really show the people in our league that we're not a fluke by just winning one meet," Penn coach Mike Schnur said. "This is our A lineup," Schnur added. "No messing around." To this end, Penn has conducted itself in practice this week in a way that it hopes is conducive to being in optimal racing shape tomorrow. "We definitely haven't been working as hard as we were the past couple weeks," junior captain Cathy Holland said, referring to the Quakers' grueling winter-break training regimen. "We've kind of been resting our bodies [and] resting ourselves mentally to get ready for this weekend." Schnur added that Penn worked on starts and turns in practice this week. The Quakers, who had experimented with putting certain swimmers in events unfamiliar to them in recent meets, will be going with what they feel is their strongest lineup. However, some swimmers will swim in unfamiliar events that they have nonetheless performed well in. For instance, Penn senior swimmer Jamie Taylor, who has been a butterflyer and a freestyler in the majority of her Penn career, will swim the 100- and 200-yard backstrokes -- despite the fact that she became a backstroker only a few weeks ago. While only some swimmers will be affected by lineup changes, everyone will have to deal with acclimating themselves to Dartmouth's small and quirky Karl Michael & Spaulding Pools. Among other things, the starting blocks are different than those at Penn's Sheerr Pool, the lights are dim and the hostile fans are loud. "Dartmouth's pool is difficult," Schnur said. "It's a very, very old pool, and it's got some idiosyncrasies that take getting used to? we're going to have to spend some time [tonight] and [tomorrow morning] getting used to that before the meet." However, while most of the Penn swimmers have never swam competitively at Dartmouth's pool, Schnur doesn't foresee those quirks posing a problem, as long as the Quakers take their time getting used to them. "We've swam very well on the road all year, and have figured out ways to get around [the oddities of other pools]," Schnur said. Lost in the fray, at least from the Quakers' point of view is Yale, a team that the Red and Blue have little chance of defeating. With all the focus on Dartmouth, the Elis have become an almost forgotten opponent. The Elis, however, are less of an afterthought than Sunday's opponent -- Brown. Penn will have no time to recover before heading to Providence to battle the Bears, but it isn't a meet the Quakers are concerned with in the least. "I don't think anyone has really thought about Brown at all," Holland said, adding that, similar to several recent meets, many swimmers will swim in unfamiliar events Sunday.