Mark Gole Quotes (11 Quotes)

Honestly, it was a disappointing meet for them. There's many factors that can go into it - I shoulder the blame for some of it. But, at the same time, the first couple of days there, I don't think their heads were in the right place.

Honestly, we looked tired and tight in our races. Drury looked as fresh as they have - as fresh as I've seen them. ... We swam pretty much the same as we have all year long, it's just that they had that one person in every event to shut us down. I realized about halfway it was impossible to overcome it. It ended up being a long day on the pool deck.

We have guys that have 'B' cuts, but they can't go to the meet. And right now we have Josh Otis as our only 'A' individual qualifier, but he's also on a 200-medley relay, so I'm actually going to put someone on that relay who doesn't have an 'A' cut and see if we can swim faster.

Western Illinois wasn't the strongest of opponents. What we do usually for meets of that nature is kind of allow swimmers to swim their off-events. Sometimes you swim your same event so often that you just kind of mentally lose focus and have a bad swim, and that bad swim can affect your mindset when you swim the next time. I liked the opportunity to have the majority of the team swim off events.

We couldn't have done any better. Our guys showed up to race. We went season's best in approximately 90 percent of the swims, which, for training as hard as we're training, is phenomenal. Usually that does not happen at this time of the year.

I think when our team was firing on all cylinders was our two-day dual meet against the University of Indianapolis. Coming right out of the training trip, it just seemed like everything was just falling into place. We had great swims left and right.

To be honest, that's what I wanted. I didn't want to have to go into day three going, 'Is this the day we're going to come back' I didn't want to come back. I wanted to set everything up and win it outright.

I think they had a big mental letdown after losing to Rolla. And knowing that they are going against the defending national champions of a couple years in a row, I think they already knew it in their heads that they were going to lose.

I really hate excuses, but we probably had two of the most intense weeks of training the last two weeks. I was not about to sacrifice swimming fast later on just for the satisfaction of swimming fast in a dual meet. I will never do that.

Our depth is going to be what is going to come up for us against Drury. Drury has horses. They have about four or five horses that are really strong in individual events. At the same time, in order for Drury coach Brian Reynolds to even try and win a relay he's going to have to throw all four of them on one relay, where we have both of our relays equally strong. If we make up those 32 points it's going to be on our depth.

It's really tough mentally for the swimmers who have qualified for nationals because they are still training like it's the middle of the season. They are still hurting their bodies.