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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SWIMMING MEDIA CONFERENCEFebruary 18, 2013Whitney HiteTHE MODERATOR: The women's swimming team heads up to Minneapolis for the Big Ten Championship starting on Wednesday. The Badgers finished fourth at last year's meet. UW is one of the leaders by two‑time Big Ten swimmer of the week Ivy Martin, a local product from Madison East High School. Head Coach Whitney Hite is here. We'll have opening comments and then take questions. COACH HITE: Just real excited about the opportunity coming up. Obviously, we've been training since the first day of school for this. It's not the last step, but a big step for us as far as going forward and getting ready for NCAAs. Really excited as far as I think the team's peaking at the right time for Big Ten Championships and then moving on to NCAAs. Q. Can you just talk about Ivy Martin and her progress throughout the year and kind of her transition from freshman to sophomore year. COACH HITE: Ivy had a great NCAAs last year, and I kind of challenged her over the summer to kind of parlay that into a great season moving forward. She's done a great job. She's really started to kind of come out of her shell and kind of mature as an athlete and as a person. It just starts‑‑ you never know when it's going to happen. You always hope it does, but she just started clicking. Just started getting it and understanding what's going on. It usually takes a little bit of time with freshmen. She's a gamer. She's big time. She likes the spotlight. Real quiet, quiet girl, just goes about her business. But she's very, very confident, has high goals, and she's just done really, really well. Q. With the early start this season starting in September, talk about the team's progress overall, I guess, and how the highs and lows have helped them get to the point that they are right now. COACH HITE: If you look at our schedule, we've had arguably the toughest schedule of any team in the country, and that's by design. I feel like, if you want to be the best, you've got to seek out the best. We did that, swimming Michigan, Cal, Stanford, the Ohio State invite, a lot of the top teams were there, USC. We've been put to the test, and that's all by design to make sure that they're ready for Big Tens and NCAAs. There's going to be no surprises. We've seen the best teams, seen the best swimmers. We're prepared. At this point, it's all about just executing. We've got a game plan. We know what to do. We know how to raise‑‑ we've been in pressure situations. The more times I can put my athletes in pressure situations, the more often they'll respond in a positive way. We're set. We're ready to go. Q. The demanding schedule in the early part of it, was it an eye‑opening experience for any of your swimmers early. Even though you've talked about what they've learned throughout the course of the year, were some of them‑‑ I don't want to say taken aback, but did it tell them some things? COACH HITE: Yeah, a little bit. It's always good to see where you rank. We've got rankings that are kind of arbitrary at best. I think it's important to say, you know, if Cal has some swimmers that are the best in the country, how are we doing against them? They've learned along the way that that's a big part of what we try to do with this program is making sure we're better each time out and making sure that, if, okay, if we had success today, why did we have that success? We didn't do as well as we wanted. Okay, what's the reason for that? And moving forward, we have a young team. Over half of our team is freshmen and sophomores. I think about 65%. So we have a large senior class, but our freshman class is even bigger than the senior class. So we're bottom heavy as far as that goes, and it's all about educating and making them aware of, okay, why are we doing this? What's the end game? And making sure that their eyes are on the prize at the end. Q. Talking about your bottom heavy roster, how have the seniors kind of paced and led the team this year even though they are outnumbered? COACH HITE: Got two great captains, Ruby Martin and Hannah Ross. I've known Hannah for five years now. She started at Washington when I was there and went down to Arizona for a couple of years and now has been here for two. Great leaders. We've just done a really good job of putting our seniors in positions to lead the team, making sure that they are vocal, making sure that they're helping the freshmen along the way, and understanding what their role is as far as leaders, and doing the right thing both in and out of the pool. Q. Coach, did you have a chance to see any of the state swimming done at the Nat this weekend? If you did, what did you think? What are you thinking about some of the local schools that have such dominance like Madison Memorial, Monona Grove, and McFarland? COACH HITE: This weekend, really good performances. It's always good to see fast swimming on the high school level because that makes us better. We're kind of all in it together. I was really impressed with the local talent, and one of our priorities is making sure that the top recruits at least have Wisconsin as an option for them. Locking up the borders, making sure we're getting the best talent to stay in state. THE MODERATOR: Anything else for Coach? Thanks. Good luck. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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