Swim team ready for inaugural season

Wayland Baptist University announced last fall that it would implement a men's and women's swimming and diving program starting in 2013. In February, Alyson Hannan was introduced as the first head coach of the program.
 
Fast forward to this fall and Hannan and her 20 swimmers have been hard at work preparing for Oct. 6, the first swim competition in school history.
 
"The team looks great right now," Hannan said. "We've been in the water for about five weeks now, and we're really excited about the first meet that's coming up."
 
For their first meet at 2 p.m. Sunday, the Pioneers will travel to Midland to take on UT-Permian Basin in a dual meet. Hannan explained that the meet will be a good measuring stick for the rest of the season.
 
"It's going to be a good test to see where we are and where we need to go from there to get to nationals," she said. "We're really looking forward to making a splash pretty soon."
 
Hannan's squad has experienced a taste of competition already this year when they held a Blue-Gold meet on Sept. 14.
 
"Our intrasquad was fun. We did a really good job and the kids swam fast," recalled Hannan. "We're in a different facility so it was nice to see them step up and race each other. We had been training pretty hard at that point, so to see them be able to do that was awesome."
 
In the short time that Hannan has had with her team, she already has been impressed with what they have shown her, and she is setting the bar high for the program's first season.
 
"Being the first season I think the goal is to show who we are at the NAIA level and see what we can do at nationals," she said. "I always have high hopes, so I'd like to be ranked in the top 10 and finish in the top three in a couple relays on the guys side.
 
"On the women's side, hopefully we'll have a couple qualify to go to nationals and then we'll see where we can go from there."
 
Wayland has had to work particularly hard during preseason workouts in a number of ways. For one, there is no pool on the WBU campus so the Pioneers have been working out at the Plainview YMCA while also traveling to Lubbock on occasion. Secondly, the pool that the Pioneers spend the majority of their training time in is in meters instead of yards, which is the measurement used for their competitions.
 
"It's a little different swimming meters versus yards," Hannan said. "It's been a big adjustment for a lot of my kids…but they're getting encouraged knowing that we're able to convert the times pretty quickly so that they're not hitting the wall thinking that their going times that are slower than they're actually going.
 
"The YMCA's pool is meters, and it's been an adjustment for everybody being in a meter facility, but everyone has welcomed it with open arms and embraced the challenge. It's been encouraging to see them step up to the challenge."
 
Since the Pioneers do not have a home meet, Sunday's competition is Wayland's closest to Plainview this season. The following week Wayland will travel to its next closest competition site, Abilene, Texas, to take on McMurry University at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 9.