The UW-Whitewater Men’s Swim and Dive team is a program that won’t get talked about too much in the next few months, part of why is how their season is structured. The schedule is sparse. The season spans from October to February with just 10 scheduled competitions. During that time there are sometimes extended breaks, but none longer than the two month hiatus from competition which they just started.
The break is a valuable time to the team as it allows athletes to get a little time to be home and do their own training. That time at home is shorter than it is for the general student body though. Classes start Jan. 22, but the swim and dive team has plans for before then.
“We’ll come back to campus Jan. 3 to train together for a week, and then our team is headed to Florida for our annual winter training trip,” head coach Elise Knoche said. “We leave campus so that we can focus just on training hard and bonding as a team. The annual trip is a great way to help our team come together and train incredibly hard.”
The time in Florida is valuable for the team as it allows them to focus on just themselves without needing to worry about classes. Someone who will be making great use of the trip is sophomore Dom Schlueter. He is young but he is one of the most impactful athletes on the team.
“It’s really more of an opportunity to get some team bonding in,” Schlueeter said. “Obviously as well as training. We train twice a day, two hours each, so four hours total each day for seven days… It’s go time, it’s time to really put the head down and go to work.”
Schlueter and the Warhawks closed out the first portion of their season in Wheaton, Illinois, at the Wheaton Invitational where Schlueter made a splash by breaking a Whitewater team record. His 200-yard freestyle time of 1 minute, 40.6 seconds was almost a quarter second faster than any other Warhawk ever, but he is not too amped up about it.
“It’s cool, it’s a record, but all it is is a name on a wall,” Schneider said. “It’s going to be broken again, hopefully by me. I’ve got three more years to break it, I plan to get it as far down as possible. But at the end of the day it’s a name on a board.”
According to Knoche, Schlueter does well to balance hard work, both in the pool and in the weight room, with having fun with teammates to help create a good atmosphere. The sophomore’s success is not a big surprise, he was the WIAC Newcomer of the Year last season so the expectations were already high.
“This season Dom has been training even harder than he had last year, so I’m not surprised that he already broke our 200-free school record,” Knoche said. “With additional training in December and January, and then a full taper, I am excited to see a lot more fast swimming from Dom and the rest of our team come WIAC Championships.”
The Warhawks took third place as a team at the Wheaton Invitational, which met the goal they set at the beginning of the year. The invite was not just good for the sake of competition, but was a nice practice run to get ready for the WIAC meet in February.
“A reason we attend the Wheaton Invitational is that it is a prelims-finals meet, just like we will have at the WIAC Championships. These are the only two meets we have as prelims-finals, so the Wheaton Invitational is a great way to ‘practice’ the schedule for the WIAC Championships,” Knoche said.
For Schuleter, the invite serves as a great opportunity to learn more about where you are.
“More than anything it’s really a wake up call. If you don’t really do well at Wheaton it’s ‘wow I’ve got to get back in the pool and keep training hard.’ Fortunately I did pretty well, that was actually a confidence booster for me,” Schuleter said. “I think it was a confidence booster for our team as well, we had some really fast swims.”
Whitewater will look to use what they learned at the Wheaton Invitational as well as their experiences there and on their team Florida trip to put themselves in a good position to perform well when the WIAC meet opens Feb. 14 in Milwaukee.
