The LSU men’s and women’s swimming and diving squads travel to Knoxville, Tenn. on Wednesday to compete for three days in the Tennessee Invitational at the Allan Jones Intercollegiate Aquatic Center.
The invitational is held in the same pool and structured the same as February’s Southeastern Conference Championships.
LSU swimming coach Dave Geyer said the invitational gives the Tigers a chance to experience the environment in which they will compete later in the season.
“It’s sort of a trial run for our conference meet,” Geyer said. “It gets us a foot in the door ahead of time to learn how to prepare, plan and work on our travel better for the conference meet.”
LSU diving coach Doug Shaffer stressed the importance of acclimating to the format and pool.
“The benefit of invitationals is that it puts us in more of a conference tournament type environment where we have a preliminaries and a finals,” Shaffer said. “It’s an opportunity to perform well in preliminaries in order to move forward into the finals.”
LSU’s divers will also get a chance to compete and showcase their abilities on the platform dive for the first time this season.
“We’ve made steady progress all year long [on the platform] and we’ll continue to do that,” Shaffer said. “This will be our first shot out of the gate.”
Shaffer and Geyer both said the level of competition in the pool and on the boards is going to be the highest the Tigers have seen so far this season.
“It’s definitely stronger and deeper than we’ve had in years past going to different meets,” Geyer said. “It gives our teams a higher level of competition to compete in at this point of the season.”
The three-day competition includes athletes from Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisville, Southern Illinois, Texas A&M and LSU.
The invitational will include long course swims in the morning preliminary events and short course events in the evening finals. This format gives long distance swimmers a chance to post long-distance swim times in the morning and then come back and contribute in short course events the same day.
“Best case scenario would be to have a couple more kids qualify for the Olympic trials in the morning and then have some athletes in position to get faster times in relays and individual performances for NCAAs [in the evening],” Geyer said.
Geyer said as far as the overall squad outcome for the event, LSU is focusing on three or four main events and not overloading the athletes.
 
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