For the past few years, Missouri State and TCU have been a part of the winter invitational meet hosted by Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas every year, which is Missouri State head coach Dave Collins’ home town.
“We have always tried to do something in December that I really wasn’t too worried about times (we usually do a suited invited in November),” Collins said.
“I got to talking with Richard (Sybesma) at TCU last year at the meet, and I said ‘ya know, we’ve got two very evenly matched teams, let’s see what else we can do.'”
And thus, a new idea was born. This December, instead of travelling to a far away training meet, the two programs will meet halfway at the Jenks Aquatic Center just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma for three days of training and competition.
“There’s a beautiful brand new facility at Jenks about halfway in between so we said “hey, let’s see if we can’t get in there,” and we couldn’t get in last year, but we got in there this year.” Collins said. “In between practices, we’re going to do a clinic for all of the age group kids, and that’s going to help us make it work.”
Note: Collins specified that the clinic would, in line with NCAA rules, be for swimmers lower than 8th grade.
This will be one of the unique events in swimming, if not all of college sports. From Thursday through Saturday, the teams will split into different training groups, and actually have joint practices, followed by a meet on Friday and Saturday nights.
“Rather than going through a prelims swim of a 100 back, we’d rather have my guy swimming 30×100’s best average with their guy next to him, and see what happens,” Collins said of what he hopes to learn from the joint training. “Our compliance people cleared it, and it’s basically going to be a warmup for the meet later in the day. We’re going to treat it like a prelims session, and I’d rather us win the prelims than the actual meet.
A recent facelift to TCU’s natatorium includes lining the facility with murals. (Photo: TCU Athletics)
“We’re hoping to see something special out of these kids, we’ll hopefully see some of them flex their muscles. I think this is going to be the best two-or-three practices that we see all season.”
Perhaps the best battle will come in the backstroke group. There, Missouri State’s Paul Le, who placed 15th at last year’s NCAA Championships in the 200 back, and TCU’s Cooper Robinson, the Big 12 Champion in the same event, will go head-to-head. Neither swimmer is known as the most outgoing on the pool deck, but this could be a great opportunity to see the juniors really step out and battle in practice.
TCU coach Richard Sybesma added that his club was excited to try this with training together in the morning and then competing and racing hard in the afternoons.
“We will split our coaching staffs and team by stroke groups in the morning and then ‘get it on’ in the afternoon. It will be a fun and motivating time for everyone involved.”
And, Sybesma closes on a good point, “It’s a chance to see Division I swimming in the state of Oklahoma.”
This could be an instance where the training that morning is as exciting, if not more exciting, than the meet. We’re already working with the coaching staffs on putting together some cool analysis and videos of the workouts, observations between what they see in the morning and what they’ll see in the afternoon, etc. If you have any ideas of interesting information that could be culled from the event, please let us know.
If only more college teams showed this much camaraderie. I would without question travel a good distance and pay fair money to witness this unique opportunity.
I would buy tickets to watch that.