The women’s swimming and diving team will head to New Haven, Conn., today to compete in its first meet of the season against Yale. The Lions ended last season with a 6-3 record (4-3 Ivy) and finished sixth in the Ivy League Championships to conclude the season. Yale’s final record for regular-season competition was 8-3 (5-2 Ivy), and it placed third at the Ivy Championships. When the two teams met last fall, the Bulldogs defeated the Lions 199-101.

However, the Lions will be returning many strong swimmers this year, including sophomores Katie Meili and Caroline Lukins, juniors Isabelle Vandenbroucke, Caitlin Rogers, and Paige Endsley, and seniors Abby Reilly and Mariele Dunn, all of whom contributed valuable points in the Ivy Championships last season.

“We are very excited to start the competition season,” head coach Diana Caskey said. “The team has great energy, and the training has been very high quality and has already produced some impressive racing in the practice setting.”

The Lions have added many new members to the team for the 2010 season, including 12 freshman swimmers and a new assistant coach, Michael Sabala.

“The freshman class has brought intensity and enthusiasm to Uris Pool,” Caskey said. “They are a talented and hard-working group, and it will be great to see what they can do in a meet setting.” Although Sabala is new to this position on the coaching staff, he has been an assistant for the past two seasons.

“This meet will represent a new era in the Columbia-Yale rivalry,” Caskey said, as Cristina Teuscher, CC ’00, recently took the head coaching position for the Bulldogs.“So the meet will be interesting, exciting, and collegial. We all want to swim fast and win, but Cristina has a keen interest in making the best opportunities for all the athletes competing to swim fast. I think the Kiphuth Memorial Exhibition Pool will be a bit more welcoming to the Columbia women than in the past.”

Caskey and her team look forward to this first competition of the season. “We are going to prepare to swim fast and go after it,” Caskey said. “As far as group goals for the season, we want to have all lifetime bests at championships and finish top three at Ivies. We want more swims in the top eight and top 16 than ever before and more individual titles than ever before.”

The 2010-2011 season kicks off at Yale at 6 p.m.