Pac-10 foes come to town Friday and Saturday as the ASU men's and women's swimming and diving teams will get their first look at conference competition this season.
The women have two meets this weekend, as they face UCLA Friday at 2 p.m. and then they will square off against USC the following day at 1 p.m. Since UCLA does not have a men's team, the men will only compete on Saturday against the Trojans.
"Being Pac-10 teams, certainly there is a little more of a mental excitement because of that," coach Michael Chasson said. "Those teams are historically great, and over the years we've had some exciting meets with both schools."
Both UCLA and USC bring very good squads in this year and will be contenders in the Pac-10, but Chasson is hoping to see some good things from the Sun Devils as well.
"I hope the women's meets will be exciting," Chasson said. "Both teams are very good, and they both have got good diving, particularly SC, so that will be a tough meet. On the men's side, SC has about four guys that are Olympic finalists, so they are very good, but we want to have some good races and be competitive."
This will be the first competition in three weeks for both teams, after a busy weekend at the end of October in which the men defeated UC-Santa Barbara and lost to the University of Las Vegas while the women beat UNLV but fell to both Santa Barbara and Penn State.
Chasson feels the teams have used the time off well and hopes to see them come out strong this weekend.
"I'm hoping we'll swim some faster times," Chasson said. "When we swam our last meets we had 12 recruits visiting and we had a lot going on, so it was tough. But now we feel a little stronger and a little more rested. We've been working on speed a little bit more, so hopefully we'll see some good results."
This is also both teams' final action until the Texas Invitational, which takes place Dec. 1-3 and will serve as their major halfway test.
"This is the tune-up to get the kinks out to get ready for that meet, so they can see where they are going into the Texas meet, and then we'll see what happens at Texas," Chasson said.
Reach the reporter at matthew.storey@asu.edu.
