- Women's Big Ten Swimming & Diving Notes/Guide(.PDF)
- Women's Big Ten Championships Psych Sheet(.PDF)
- Big Ten Preview/Championship Central
- Minnesota's Big Ten Championships Page
| Erin Morris will look to place in the top five of the 200 backstroke for the fourth straight year at Big Ten's and is also looking to qualify for the NCAA Championships for the fourth time in her career. |
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.; February 6, 2007 - The Penn State women's swimming and diving team heads to Minneapolis, Minn. this weekend to look for their third consecutive Big Ten championship title and their fourth in six years. The three-day event will be held Thursday-Saturday, February 8-10 at the University of Minnesota's University Aquatic Center.
Preliminaries on each of the three days of the championship will begin at 11:00 a.m. central time, noon eastern, with the nightly finals beginning at 7:00 p.m. central time, 8:00 p.m. eastern. Live scoring of the entire meet will be available as will a video webcast of the finals. All are available on Minnesota's website.
The Nittany Lions enter the Big Ten Championships with a perfect 11-0 record in dual meets this year. In their one meet this year that was run with a prelim-finals format, Penn State finished 3rd out of 69 teams at the Bell Grand Prix in Toronto, Ontario held over Thanksgiving weekend back in November.
| Megan Palera is also looking to qualify for the NCAA Championships for the fourth straight year. |
Entering the Big Ten Championships, Penn State's swimmers have a total of 30 NCAA qualifying times and three NCAA Zone qualifying scores for diving. A total of 12 swimmers are responsible for these 30 times, 15 swimmers if three additional swimmers are included that swam on relay teams that have NCAA times but have not swam an NCAA cuts in any individual events yet. Of these 30 times, 27 are NCAA 'B' provisional qualifying times while three are 'A' automatic cuts. Already guaranteed to go to the NCAA Championships with 'A' cuts before Big Ten's begin are Karie Haglund (200 butterfly), Kelly Nelson (200 butterfly) and Kaitlin O'Brien (400 IM).
O'Brien is the defending Big Ten Champion in the 400 IM and is Penn State's only defending champion this year. Although they won Big Ten's for the second straight year last year, the Nittany Lions had only two individual champions in O'Brien and the graduated Sarah Haupt in the 100 backstroke. However, depth is a key in winning a conference championship because in order to accumulate points, depth is what is needed. Of the 552 points earned at last year??s Big Ten Championships, the swimmers and divers responsible for 402 of those total points return this year, nearly 73 percent. Those 402 points do not include the 58 points earned by the 200 and 400 freestyle relay teams and the 400 medley relay team, all of which return parts of the teams this year. Departed seniors Amberle Biedermann and Sarah Haupt both swam on all three of those teams but the other two members of each of those three relay teams all return.
The Nittany Lion squad will be looking to become the first team to win three straight championships since Michigan won 12 straight from 1987-98. Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State are the only schools in the Big Ten to have won more than three championships.