Both the men’s and women’s swim and dive teams picked up statement wins as the Hoosiers closed out the regular season by sweeping the Wisconsin Badgers and the Louisville Cardinals on Friday. The No. 9 women picked up two huge wins as they beat the eighth-ranked Cardinals 181-119 and the 14th-ranked Badgers 205-95. The No. 6 men on the other hand beat the 15th-ranked Cardinals 189-110 and the 22nd-ranked Badgers 202-96.
The main story of the day was the amount of records broken by the Hoosiers. In their biggest meet of the season, the relay teams stepped up with the men’s and women’s winning both 200-meter medley competitions early and and notching their best times of the season with the men finishing in 1:22.88 and the women posting a time of 1:35.86.
The women caught fire by winning four straight events with Anna Peplowski posting a program record time of 1:42.40 in the 200 freestyle competition and she now has the five fastest times in the event in program history. Junior Ching Hwee Gan won the 1,000-meter freestyle with a time of 9:30.07 for a program record. Toward the end of the competition, the women rewrote their own program record as Ashley Turak, Peplowski, Ella Ristic and Kristina Paegle broke their own program record in the women's 400-meter freestyle relay competition.
In similar fashion to the Jan. 27 meet against Purdue, the Hoosiers came out the gate extremely strong and took demanding leads going into the first break with the men’s team leading the Cardinals 86-45 and the Badgers 91-40. The women’s side was a similar story as the first break saw Indiana up 109-41 against the Badgers and 98-52 over the Cardinals.
In the diving competitions, Indiana’s Max Weinrich had a huge day as he swept the 1-meter and 3-meter competitions with personal bests of 388.13 in the 1-meter and 428.93 in the 3-meter competition. The women’s diving team saw senior Anne Fowler continue her dominant run as she came in first place in both the 1-meter competition and the 3-meter competition. Her teammates rounded out the top three in the 3-meter competition as Skyler Liu placed second and freshman Lily Witte finished third.
Next up for the Hoosiers is the Big Ten Championships from Feb. 28 to March 2 in Columbus, Ohio. Indiana will walk into this event as the team to beat in the Big Ten as both teams round out their extremely strong regular seasons undefeated. The only blemish on their record is the women’s second place finish in Columbus during the Ohio State Invitational on Nov. 18.
