While most students head home for Thanksgiving this weekend, the men's swimming and diving team will travel to the University of Tennessee to face the No. 14 Volunteers in Virginia's first away meet of the season.
"You will have two of the top 15 teams in the country square away in a very competitive dual meet," Virginia coach Mark Bernardino said. "It'll be a fun meet and should be a very close meet, coming down to the last event or two."
Tennessee has been a swimming powerhouse since the early 1970s, rarely finishing outside the top 15 nationally. In the last 15 years, as Virginia has come onto the national stage, the competition between the two teams has become fierce.
"They have a long, long history of spectacular swimming," Bernardino said. "We are more of the newcomer on the national scene. That said, in the last five or six years it seems to have come down to the last two events in our meets to determine the victor."
Last year, the Cavaliers fell 108-135 to the then-10th-ranked Volunteers. Tennessee's latest victory this season, over the ACC's North Carolina State Wolfpack, gives the Volunteers a 4-0 record going into Friday's meet.
While both teams are extremely talented, Bernardino characterizes the meet as a match-up between "opposites." Indeed, Virginia's strengths are in direct opposition to Tennessee's weaknesses, and vice versa: the Cavaliers dominate breaststroke versus the Volunteers, the backstroke; the Cavaliers are strong distance swimmers, but the Volunteers are strong sprinters. Therefore, the meet will be one in which both teams vie to take advantage of their assets while simultaneously exploiting the holes in the other's lineup.
The pivotal events will be the 200-yard IM, 200-yard butterfly, 200-yard backstroke and 200-yard free. According to Bernardino, the team with the most victories in these events will almost certainly win the meet and the swimmers who win them will be those athletes, from either team, who step up to the challenge.
One group of athletes that would especially like to rise to the occasion is the freshmen men. These young swimmers have already scored a number of points for the team and have helped Virginia remain undefeated, 4-0 overall and 3-0 in the ACC.
In Virginia's last dual meet against ACC foe Georgia Tech, freshman Dan McMahon won the 200 Butterfly (1:51.69), one of the crucial events that could decide this weekend's match-up. He, along with the rest of the team, is hoping for a repeat performance.
"We are a really large first-year class of guys and really want to continue contributing as best we can," McMahon said. "This is our first away meet this weekend and we just want to get up on the block and race the best that we can."
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