Texas Women Load Up, Will Face Top 3 Teams from NCAA’s in 2014-2015

The Texas Longhorn women’s swimming & diving team has loaded up this season, producing a regular-season schedule that will include the top four finishing teams from last year’s NCAA Championship meet: Georgia, Stanford, the Cal Golden Bears, and their former Big 12 foes the Texas A&M Aggies.

In total, among dual, tri, and quad meets alone, Texas will share the pool with all of the programs that have ever won NCAA Championships since they were first awarded in 1982: the Florida Gators, who won in 1982 and 2010, and the USC Trojans, who won in 1997.

Carol Capitani has scheduled meets against the winners of the other 30 NCAA Championships (of which Texas itself has won 7 – the 2nd-most of all-time).

Texas opens the season with its Orange-White intrasquad meet on October 17th, which is relatively late in the season.

They’ll then fly to Ann Arbor, Michigan for their first inter-collegiate competition of the season, against Indiana, Michigan, and Louisville in a two-day battle royale. Indiana was 12th at NCAA’s last year, Michigan was 30th, Louisville was 15th, and all three programs appear to be better this year than they were last.

Even with three of the 30 best teams in the NCAA to formally begin their competition schedule, that doesn’t even come close to what lies next for the Longhorns. Less than a week later, they’ll head west to the San Francisco Bay for back-t-back meets against Stanford (who were 2nd at NCAA’s last year) and Cal (who were 3rd at NCAA’s) on October 30th and 31st.

That will be the last road trip, for the swimmers at least, of the semester. Another week later, they’ll welcome in the Texas A&M Aggies – a meet that was separated by just four points, in favor of A&M, last season. That meet will be on November 7th and will be followed by the Texas Diving Invitational from November 20th-22nd.

Next up will be the famed Texas Invite, arguably the highlight of the annual invite schedule. Though the full lineup for this year’s meet hasn’t been released, among the teams we do know will be there will be BYU, Wisconsin, and USC (who, by the way, is the 5th-place team from last year’s NCAA Championship meet).

The college schedule will take a break for the winter (those qualified divers will head to USA Diving Winter Nationals), and the Longhorns will get a breather to regroup after a tough competition schedule.

Then they jump into the new year on January 8th with a trip to Auburn, Alabama to face Brett Hawke’s Tigers, who were 14th at NCAA’s last year. A left turn up I-85 will take Texas next to Athens, Georgia to race the two-time defending NCAA Champions Georgia Bulldogs.

The trip will be a familiar one for the Texas head coach Capitani, as she was an assistant at Georgia for 14 years in total, across two stints, and was a part of the program’s first four NCAA Championship winning teams.

Then the Longhorns will buckle down until NCAA’s at home. On January 30th and 31st, they welcome in Arizona & SMU for a tri meet, and then finish the regular season with their only Big 12 opponent of the regular season: the TCU Horned Frogs on February 6th.

Texas will host the Big 12 Championships from February 25th-28th, as they have every year since A&M and Missouri left the conference, and will follow it with a Big 12 Invite that will serve as a Last Chance meet on Sunday.

Longhorn divers will go to Iowa City for the Zone D qualifying meet, and those who make the cuts will head to the NCAA Championships in Greensboro, North Carolina from March 19th-21st.

The Texas women finished the season as the 9th-best team in the country last year, and while they graduated a really good group (Ellen Lobb, Sam Tucker, Lily Moldenhauer), they’re bringing in a very good group of freshmen as well to challenge what is undeniably the toughest schedule in the NCAA this season.

The full schedule is below: