Lindenwood’s swimming and diving team will participate in the Delta Invitational Meet this weekend in Cleveland, Mississippi.

The swimming and diving team is composed of 65 student-athletes this season. For that reason, the coaches are going to choose 18 men and 18 women to go to the GLVC Championships and to possibly be able to qualify for the National Championships.

“I think there’s gonna be some people cut, therefore you have to show that you’re worthy of being taken to this meet, so that is a little bit of pressure on people as well,” senior Marit De Lau said.

Each swimmer is going to participate in three-to-four events. The meet will be held from Saturday, Dec. 11, to Tuesday, Dec. 14. The preliminaries of each event will be swam in the mornings and the finals in the afternoons.

“The mid-season meet is usually just at the end of the fall semester just to see where we’re at, it doesn’t really matter what you do it’s just kind of a point in the season, where it’s like ‘what can I improve?’,” De Lau said. “We are trying to go really fast because we rest a little bit towards the meet, but if we don’t swim our best times, it’s not the end of the world.”

Their second most important competition of the season is the GLVC Championship, which will be the second week of Feb. 2022 at Elkhart, Indiana, where the women’s team will look to win another conference title.

“GLVC for swimming is very hard to win because we have a lot of good teams competing against each other,” De Lau said.

The men’s swimming team finished third in the conference last year behind Drury University and the University of Indianapolis.

“In conference, our goal is to be top two since we were top three last year,” junior Sebastián Silva said.

The National Championship will be held during Lindenwood’s spring break, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“We’re gonna try to get a better place this year at nationals than we did last year, but we have a really strong team so we should be able to, but we’ll see what’s gonna happen,” De Lau said.

Last season, the Lions’ swim team qualified 18 swimmers for the National Championships, with Gerald Brown placing first in the 100m breaststroke event. All-American awards were given to the 18 swimmers for their performance.

“We would like to be top three at Nationals,”  Silva said. “We have a very strong diving team this year, we got three more divers which are very good, they’re almost all qualified for Nationals already, so we expect them to perform really well.”

Lindenwood athletes will have to compete against each other to get a spot on the competitive team and that way have the chance to qualify for Nationals and be able to represent Lindenwood University nation-wide.