The No. 1 Arizona men’s and No. 5 women’s swim and dive teams will travel to Northern California this weekend to face the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal. The Wildcats face Cal today at 2 p.m., and the Stanford meet is scheduled for noon on Saturday.
Both meets will be tough on the Wildcats. Cal and Stanford are both ranked in the top 10 nationally, and the predicted high for the entire weekend in the Bay Area is 49 degrees, with showers throughout. Arizona head coach Eric Hansen isn’t worried about the challenges it will present.
“They’ll be fast and it’s going to be cold and rainy, it’s not going to be optimal, but everybody’s got to swim in it,” Hansen said. “We’ll make the best of it. We want to be fast in March, and now’s the time where we’ve got to start getting sharp. We look forward to the challenge.”
The Wildcats have been riding high since the Texas Invite in December, in which they qualified 11 individuals and all relay teams for 17 events. Since then, they’ve been training not only for the meets this weekend, but the rest of the schedule in general, said associate head coach Geoff Hanson.
“The Texas Invite was kind of our peak in December for first semester, then we got back to training,” Hanson said. “It’s been a heavy training workload, but at the same time that’s what we have to do if we want to peak in March.”