This weekend's Georgia Invitational will pit five of the top 25 teams in the country against one another. As the Virginia men's and women's swimming and diving teams compete against Harvard, Northwestern, West Virginia and Georgia, both the school's reputation and the fate of Virginia teams in the ACC conference are on the line.
"We selected this meet because we knew there was going to be one of the top teams in the Big East, one of the top teams in the Big Ten, and one of the top teams from the Ivy League," Virginia coach Mark Bernardino said. "There are going to be a lot of outstanding swimmers at this meet for both genders -- big time nationally and internationally decorated athletes."
This weekend's invitational will be formatted like NCAA Championship meets. The competition will span three days with the preliminary swims taking place in the morning and the qualifying swimmers moving on to the finals in the afternoon. As a young team with little championship meet experience, the Cavaliers will gain valuable exposure that will help them prepare for February.
The Virginia women (4-2, 2-0 ACC) are coming off a long break. After competing against Michigan State, Purdue and Penn State in early November, they want to show that they have improved since falling to the Penn State Nittany Lions 218-134.
"I think we have used the time wisely," Bernardino said. "We have trained very hard, we have done some real good work and this last week, we had the chance to incorporate some speed work into their training."
The No. 15 Cavalier women will face the top team in the country, Georgia. Bernardino characterized the Bulldog women as an unbelievably outstanding team that is deep up and down the lineup with very few weaknesses to exploit. Well-coached and on top of their game, the Bulldogs are a formidable opponent, but pose a challenge Virginia is embracing.
"We are really excited to get in and swim them and swim some really good individual swimmers," sophomore Jenn Narum said. "It is going to be a really good competition for the team as a whole. It's going to be good -- we are going to go in, put our heads down and just go to work."
Coming off an outstanding performance against Tennessee where they executed their race strategies extremely well, the No. 14 Cavalier men (5-1, 2-0 ACC) are out to topple No. 9 Georgia and No. 17 Northwestern.
"Even though we lost to Tennessee, they are one of the top two or three dual--meet teams right now, and we scored more points than Auburn, the defending national champions, did against them," junior Lee Robertson said. "At this meet it would be great to win the invite, but we really want to use this meet to see where we are as a team time-wise."
Indeed, this weekend's meet will serve as a midseason measuring stick. Facing excellent competition, the Cavaliers will be able to assess where they are and where they need to go in the coming months in order to be dominant in the postseason.
"This is a stiff test with Georgia, Northwestern, Virginia, West Virginia and Harvard," Bernardino said. "It is five of the top 25 teams in the country going at it, so it will be a lot of fun"
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