The divers have to go off campus to train. The swimmers only have a temporary pool for practice. The men's and women's swimming and diving teams cannot have any home meets this season. But despite all these setbacks, both teams are going into the winter season with positive attitudes and with the hope that positive results will follow.
The team's good attitude seems to stem in large part from the new diving coach, L. Channing Kimball. Before coming to Brown, Kimball was the diving coach at Alma College in Michigan for three years. During her own collegiate diving career at the University of Wyoming, she served as captain in her junior and senior year, and won the university's swimming and diving most inspirational award in 2003. She now has brought that inspiration to Brown.
"She's exciting to be around," said men's tri-captain Conor Carlucci '11. "It's nice to always see a smiling face around."
"She's doing a great job at providing motivation and discipline," said Head Coach Peter Brown.
In addition to Kimball's leadership, Brown said he is depending on the captains to lead both teams and be the standout swimmers and divers this season.
"They provide the team with a good direction," Brown said of the women's captains, Natascha Mangan '11, Kara Lindquist '11, Kelley Wisinger '11 and Allyson Schumacher '12. "Once you have those good things in place, then you can go somewhere from there."
Brown also said he expects the freshmen to be "full-fledged team members." However, he was reluctant to name any of the freshmen or other players specifically, because "it's hard to single any of them out without talking about all of them."
Brown's reluctance emphasizes his belief in maintaining a team mentality, even though swimming and diving are individual sports.
"I think working together is really important," Brown said. "You can always achieve to a certain level, especially individually, but when you work as a team, you can achieve things you couldn't even imagine."
Carlucci echoed his coach's sentiments.
"We're trying to focus on everyone getting faster individually, and that will lead to better team performances," he said.
With better team performances comes the hope that both the men's and women's squads will be able to improve their overall records this year, especially their conference standings. Carlucci said the diving team is looking forward to its first Ivy League meet Nov. 20 against Dartmouth. The Princeton Invitational, Dec. 3–5, will provide a good measurement of how well the team is faring and what they need to improve, she added.
"We're on the rise and only going to keep getting better," Carlucci said.
The women's team dives into its season Friday at Providence College starting at 5 p.m. A day later, the men kick off the year with an 11 a.m. meet, also at PC.