As he remembers, Lou Walker and his Syracuse swimming and diving team have traveled to warmer climates during Winter Break ‘since the beginning of time.’

SU’s head coach since 1976, Walker believes the winter excursion south provides his program with one element it can’t benefit from during the school year: downtime devoted completely to swimming, which in turn gives SU the timing to prepare properly for its late-season championship meets in February.

‘It gives you a real opportunity to focus in, and your only obligation is your training,’ Walker said. ‘There’s no school requirement. It’s a great opportunity to do some good work.’

For the past few seasons, the Orange has prepared early for Big East and NCAA championships by swimming in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In Walker and the program’s final season of existence, the team made its last trip to the island from Jan. 5 to Jan. 14.

It was Walker and SU’s last opportunity to swim outdoors. Looking back on not just this year but all of the other trips, Walker reflected on the benefits.

‘If you look at the amount of weeks from the semester break to your conference championships,’ Walker said, ‘the timing of the whole thing is outstanding in terms of getting some good work done.’

Walker feels the prime reason such trips are so effective is because they occur during the break. He feels the amount of time between the trip and the Big East Championships is ideal for training purposes, and the team has more time to focus on swimming. It trickles down to the basic swimmer’s psychology. Walker has seen it occur for more than 35 years.

‘Psychologically, it’s probably a positive thing to be somewhere where there’s not another student around,’ Walker said. ‘Somewhere where it’s not cold and snowy all the time.’

Though some teams like to travel abroad, Walker prefers Puerto Rico because it is American territory, uses U.S. currency and is warm and sunny every day, unlike Syracuse.

SU senior swimmer Kuba Kotynia backed Walker’s choice of destination. He said the warm climate makes a difference in a swimmer’s motivation.

‘The whole atmosphere and the warm weather made it much easier to get up in the morning and get going,’ Kotynia said.

The trip to the climate of San Juan wasn’t all fun and games for the Orange. The week of training prepared the team for the rest of the season.

Unlike other SU programs, most members of the swimming and diving team don’t spend much time together during the semester, Walker said. SU freshman swimmer Alice Stejskal said the team took away extra training time with teammates from the last trip to the island.

‘We spent a lot of time just hanging out at the beach,’ she said.

Aside from giving them time to spend together, the trip provides the teammates the chance to swim against programs across the nation in friendly meets. This year, the team competed in meets Tuesday and Friday of the week, facing St. Mary’s, LaSalle and Harvard.

In his last go-around, the seasoned Walker recognized that his dead-man-walking program fit the bill of any other collegiate swimming team one final time. Most teams make trips south for the winter. And just like they all benefit, Walker’s soon-to-be-extinct program benefited.

Now SU has just a few weeks left of actual competition to make the most of it.

Said Walker: ‘It’s an annual thing — swim teams all around the country travel during the holidays. It serves team purposes.’

sebail01@syr.edu

 

Published on January 30, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Stephen: sebail01@syr.edu | @Stephen_Bailey1