The “whats” of swimming are no mystery. There’s a start, a race and a finish, all against a clock that determines the victor. Often, though, the general public is unaware about how collegiate swimming races are scored. If one team blows the other out of the water, the winning team is evident, but sometimes scoring can be much more technical.

For swimming in a traditional dual meet, there are two types of scoring — an individual event and a relay.

Individual event scores are dependent on the swimmer’s finishing position. First place receives the highest with nine points, while second, third, fourth and fifth are given four, three, two and one, respectively. Anything below fifth does not receive any points.

Relay events are slightly different. While there are only two teams, each team can have as many as four different relay teams competing in the same event, though relay events only award points to the first three finishing teams — 11 to first, four to second and two to third.

Before even beginning to think about earning points, swimmers have to train in their own, unique ways. Illinois swimming and diving head coach Sue Novitsky said the biggest challenge is the crossover, carrying strength built in the weight room and learning how to apply it in the water.

“A lot of it is getting (swimmers) to realize how to use certain muscle groups and how to manipulate and move their bodies a little bit, so that their strength is a little more fluid,” Novitsky said. “There are not any dead spots.”

Swimmers require a feel for the water to have power in it. Novitsky said she always worries that additional days will be needed after taking time off just to get back into the groove of things. Once swimmers get back in the pool, though, it’s back to building up a base and forcing good habits that translate into meets.

After that, it’s all pretty basic. There are four strokes that make up the swimming end of the meet: freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly. Each event begins in some relation to the starting blocks and all of them end with a hand touch at the wall.

Swimming takes up 14 of the 16 events, making it the primary focus. But Illinois diving coach Chris Waters said competitive diving is a different animal.

Aside from sharing a pool as its arena, divers are nothing like swimmers. For an NCAA Division I school like Illinois, divers are to select six types of dives from a list of options based on a degree of difficulty. Divers then step up to the board, perform their dives before a panel of judges and are scored on three elements — the approach, the flight and the entry.

Typically in dual meets, the 3-meter and 1-meter springboard competitions are the two options for divers. In larger contests, platform dives are also available. On all of these, divers receive a score 0-10, which is then applied to the degree of difficulty to receive a final score.

Divers training for competition have little in common with swimmers. Occasional, they can have similar core training exercises or warmup routines. But the majority of the time, there is a division line.

“We’re doing anaerobic training 90 percent of the time,” Water said.

There is a bright yellow trampoline inside the ARC pool which serves as training equipment frequently used by divers.

“It’s applicable to us because they can safely, with the harness and the belt, perform some skills that they may not be ready to do yet on the board,” Waters said. “They can start gaining their confidence for (diving skills).”

When it comes down to the actual meet, Waters said another thing that swimmers do is get hyped for a race, whereas divers are probably not going to be helped by it. He compared divers with professional golfers, saying the reason golfers are so good is because they have that motion down so instinctually and have repeated it so many times that they can just let their brains go and let their bodies take over. If a diver is hyped, Waters said, then their brain is interfering.

The reason why swimming and diving are paired together goes beyond the mutual need for a chlorinated pool.

“With the overlap, the (swimmers and divers) have a common bond,” Waters said. “They have a common friend who is going through something similar with the hours and the amount of training.”

Despite the differences, junior swimmer Alyssa Toland and sophomore swimmer Alison Meng agree that each side plays its own role in the meet.

“We’re one team together,” Toland said. “Obviously, it’s two different goals we’ve got going … but we can’t win the meet without their points, and they can’t win the meet without our points.”

J.J. can be reached at [email protected] and @TheWilson9287.