Sept. 28, 2004
The Notre Dame women’s swimming and diving team will open the 2004-05 season this Friday and go on to face five teams that scored points in the 2004 NCAA Championships in dual-meet action. The Irish will get the campaign underway by playing host to a pair of meets on one day, first welcoming Evansville for a dual meet at 4 p.m. (EST) and then playing host to the 21st-annual Dennis Stark Relays at 6:30 p.m., with both taking part in the Rolfs Aquatic Center.
The Irish will have three more home meets after this weekend, as they next play host to league rival Pittsburgh and Michigan State in a triangular meet on Friday, Nov. 12 at 5 p.m. (EST). The team also will have a presence at the Notre Dame Invitational, slated for Dec. 2-4, but Notre Dame also will send many of its student-athletes to Athens, Ga. for the Georgia Fall Invitational, scheduled for Dec. 3-5. The host Bulldogs finished last season #2 in the final College Swim Coaches Association (CSCAA) national dual-meet rankings and then were the runners-up at the NCAA Championships.
The lone home meet of the spring semester will be a showdown with a pair of Big Ten Conference rivals, as Michigan and Illinois will visit the Rolfs Aquatic Center for a two-day, three-session, championship-style meet from Jan. 14-15. The Wolverines were 16th in the final dual-meet rankings a season ago and finished 13th at the NCAAs, while the Fighting Illini tied for 39th in the national championship meet.
After the opening weekend of competition, Notre Dame will have nearly a month off before returning to the pool on Oct. 29 for a triangular meet with Purdue and Arizona State in West Lafayette, Ind. The Sun Devils finished 14th in the 2004 NCAA meet and were 22nd in the CSCAA rankings, while the Boilermakers – which will play host to both the NCAA Zone C Diving Championships and the NCAA Championships in 2005 – were 36th in the NCAAs last spring.
The second road trip of the fall will be when the Irish head to Bowling Green on Saturday, Nov. 20 for a dual meet. Notre Dame will then take its winter training and competition trip to St. Lucia, participating in the New Year’s Invitational on Dec. 31. After the January triangular meet, the Irish will head to Michigan for a dual meet on Jan. 28 before closing the dual-meet season on Feb. 5 at Oakland (T-39th in the ’04 NCAAs).
The 2005 BIG EAST Swimming and Diving Championships are slated for Feb. 17-19 in the Goodwill Games Pool in East Meadow, N.Y. The Irish will be aiming for their ninth consecutive league title, which would be the second-longest string of BIG EAST championships ever in any sport.
Purdue University will be the site of the final two events on the schedule: the March 11-12 NCAA Zone C Diving Championships and the March 17-19 NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships.
The 2004-05 edition of the Irish features 20 monogram winners and four former NCAA Championships qualifiers back from last year’s squad that went 8-2 to end up 20th in the CSCAA national dual-meet rankings before finishing 25th in the NCAAs.