Challenging Weekend for Both Swimmers and Divers

PROVO -- After a week-long rest the BYU swim team will travel to Long Beach, Calif. for the Toshiba Classic Nov. 19-21 for one of the fastest West Coast meets of the season and the divers will travel to Tucson, Ariz. for the Wildcat Diving Invitational to be held Nov. 20-21 with some of the top divers in the country.

“The meet is going to be contagiously exciting and we are looking forward to a highly competitive meet,” BYU head coach Tim Powers said. “It’s going to be fun to see how our team responds to such a challenging atmosphere.”

On the men’s side, the Toshiba Classic will feature 14 squads, including Stanford, the third-place finisher at the 2009 NCAA Division I National Championships. The women’s field includes 26 teams, with defending national champion California to lead the pack.

The diving team will also perform at a highly competitive meet at the University of Arizona on Friday and Saturday.

“We’ll be competing with all the Big 10 schools,” BYU diving coach Keith Russell said. “It will be a really tough competition, but we’re looking forward to competing with the big time schools. It’s not going to be easy – we’ll be diving against some Olympians and others that have made great strides in diving.”

For the Toshiba Classic, Coach Powers expressed the lack of depth the men’s team will struggle with, “We are only taking 15 guys and the meet has 32 places in each event, so it will be hard to have an impact on the team placing. However, we still want to swim well and establish good times.”

“The women should do well in this exciting meet,” said Powers. “We are bringing 24 girls that are going to be challenged, but we expect to do great things.”

The Toshiba Classic will have time trials in the morning for approximately five hours and finals at night for about three hours. Check back to www.byucougars.com/swimming_diving for updates on the Toshiba Classic and Wildcat Diving Invitational Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings.