After being ranked No. 19 by the College Swimming Coaches Association of America, the Tigers might have easily lost focus against the smaller Delta State on Friday. With almost every swimmer not participating in their normal events, the Tigers and Lady Tigers earned their second wins of the season with victories 195-89 win and 188-103 respectively. “You don’t overlook a program,” said LSU coach Adam Schmitt. “But you know that [Delta State] is a program that allows us to focus on what we need to do. We needed a simple meet like this to allow us to relax and swim our events the way we need to swim them.” The Tigers (2-2, 1-1) and the Lady Tigers (2-1, 1-1) shuffled events, swimming distance swimmers in sprinting events and sprinters in distance events. “Maybe there is someone out there that we can use to fill in a relay,” Schmitt said. “So it really lets us see how they will compete outside their box.” Junior Katherine Noland normally swims freestyle events, but she swam for first place finishes in the 100-yard backstroke and the 100-yard butterfly. Delta State, a small college in Cleveland, Miss., officially won seven of the 32 events. All seven of these victories came by LSU disqualifications. “We were very proud of how the team swam,” said Delta State coach Brian Hein. “They swam with a lot of heart and raced all the way to end.” The Statesmen took LSU to the brink in multiple events including a thrilling 200-yard individual medley. LSU freshman Clint Hallum use a spirited final lap to out-touch Delta State’s Roman Serada by two tenths of second. “Usually I swim the longer distance of the [individual medley],” Hallum said “This one was much more of a sprint, and I got myself down early. I really had to battle back, and I was definitely a second half racer on in that race.” Serada earned the victory however because of Hallum’s disqualification. “We want to be a team that gets our hand on the wall first,” Schmitt said. “It is something where we are getting a little bit of tenacity with and it shows with Clint in that 200 IM.” The Tiger divers swept their four events. Sophomore Rachel Ware and senior Paige Brown posted victories in the 1-meter and 3-meter diving. Freshman Michael Neubacher earned a first-place finish in the 1-meter diving, his first victory of the season, and junior Niko Dalman finished first in the 3-meter. “This meet we did some new dives, high difficulty dives,” Dalman said. “Right now we are weight training really hard and doing difficult dives now so that in the long run we will nail them in championship season.”