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No ‘cupcakes’ on Penn’s slate

By Michael Chien 11/18/10 12:22am

For most Penn varsity sports, nonconference play at the beginning of each season represents a critical time. Before heading into the pressure-cooker of the Ivy schedule players develop, fix-up loose ends and work out the kinks that a new season inevitably brings.

The men’s swimming team, however, is granted no such luxury.

Last Friday, it took on Columbia in the season opener. This weekend, the Quakers travel to Ithaca, N.Y., to face both Cornell and Princeton.

“Believe me, I’d like to open with four or five cupcakes, instead of opening up with Cornell and Princeton,” coach Mike Schnur said.

Unlike other Ivy sports such as football, where the regular season determines the League championship, the regular season has less importance in swimming.

Though the Quakers swim against Ivy foes early on, the dual-meet setting is merely an indication of how the team will fare in the Ivy Championships meet — when the Ivy title is on the line.

Regardless, the unique start puts added pressure on the swimmers who want to perform at their peak against their conference rivals from the very beginning.

“It just makes it so that we have to be ready to go right off the bat,” senior Alex Kalish said. “We have to be on our A-game right up front.”

One of the critical aspects in coaching a swim team is simply figuring out which swimmers will do the best in each event, so that by the time the team enters more important meets, the lineup is already fixed.

“The easy early-season schedule helps the coaches figure out what events to put everyone in; we just don’t have that advantage,” Schnur said.

“We don’t really know where to put everyone; we don’t know how everyone is training; we don’t really learn our team until the Kenyon Invitational, the first weekend of December for the boys.”

The consequences can already be seen, with the Quakers falling to Columbia in their first meet and then losing to a UConn team Saturday that was on its fifth meet of the season.

Despite the challenges of the schedule, it has been set in stone for decades and will not be changing any time soon.

“Our schedules have been set now for 20, 30, 40 years,” Schnur said. “When I was swimming here in the 80s, Cornell was our first meet too. We’ve swam Cornell in the weekend before Thanksgiving since maybe the middle 1970s.”

With that experience behind him, Schnur knows that the season is a marathon and not a sprint.

“I pride our team on being one that builds through the season and peaks at the end,” he said. “So once in a while we may throw in a rotten early season meet, but by the end of the year, it’s worth it.”