Huskers plunge toward NCAA By Jay Saunders Assignment Reporter NEBRASKA SOPHOMORE LAURA SIMON works on her backstroke during a workout at the Bob Devaney Sports Center pool. The Husker women look to retain thier Big 12 Chapionship they won last season. SCOTT MCCLURG/DN Whether it is in the water, in the weight room or on dry land, the Nebraska men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams are training for what could be a very successful season. Last year, the Cornhuskers reached new heights at the NCAA Championships as the women’s team placed eighth and the men’s team tied for 12th. The trip to the NCAA meet followed a big time performance in the first-ever Big 12 Championship. NU returns a great deal of talent on both the men’s and women’s sides. Besides the returning talent on the women’s team, which won the Big 12 conference last season, the Huskers has also added talent in diving. Freshman Amanda Zins, a Lincoln East graduate, has already made an impact for the Huskers this season. The men’s team returns five All-Americans. Sophomore Adam Pine was arguably Ne-braska’s best swimmer last season, setting NU records in the 100-yard butterfly and 100-yard freestyle. Fellow All-Americans Mark Bennett, Alex Shleifman and Josh Mathias will help NU in the freestyle events and sophomore Danny Bergman is a returning All-American diver. Pine, who is a native of Australia, said the returning swimmers in the freestyle events will help the team’s success - especially in the relays. "Every season you try to do better than the last year," Pine said. "The relays are important especially in the NCAA’s. It is so important to make the relays strong." The Huskers are hoping to build on what they started last season. With the returning ath-letes, NU Coach Cal Bentz said another run through the Big 12 and NCAA Championships may be a possibility. NEBRASKA FRESHMAN SWIMMER JOE BURGARD competed in the Big 12 Invitational Swim Meet earlier this season. Many of the Husker winter sports have already begun competition or will start their seasons within the next two weeks. RYAN SODERLIN/DN "We want to start where we left off last year and move forward," Bentz said. "We don’t want to backtrack. The plan is by the Big 12 Championships and the NCAA, we will be swimming as fast as ever." In order for the Huskers to get the results they want at the end of the year, Bentz said the work the team does now may dictate NU’s success. Since practices began, the Huskers have been in the pool for an average of nine workouts a week. "We are moving toward race-oriented training," Bentz said. "We are working more on honing skills to prepare to swim more and more races." Besides the swimmers’ work in the pool, the team has also been doing a lot of work in the weight room and outside of the water. The athletes have been doing a lot of dry land exercises such as working with medicine balls and other aerobic exercises. Bentz said all of the work the Huskers do out of the pool is vital to success later in the sea-son, when swimmers should hopefully be cutting times on a their races. "They are all interrelated," Bentz said. "They play a role in the total performance of a stu-dent athlete." While the team gears its workouts toward the end-of-the-season meets, the Huskers have already started competitive swimming. NU played host to the Big 12 Relay Meet and the Big 12 Invitational in late October. Bentz said those two meets provided a lot of good results for the Huskers. Pine said any success the Huskers get early in the season is nice, but he said the Huskers will take late-season success over an early victory. "We are still in the early phases," Pine said. "Coming into December we should be swim-ming really well. It’s not like football, we are gearing our season toward one meet."