Louisville Cancels Home Meet Against Notre Dame and Miami Due to COVID-19 Cases
The Louisville Cardinals were scheduled to host Notre Dame and the Miami women’s team Friday afternoon, but the meet is off due to issues with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The team announced that the meet was cancelled “due to a handful of recent positive COVID-19 cases” in a very short statement. No further details were available. The meet will not be made up, and Louisville is next scheduled to compete in its mid-season invitational at Purdue beginning on November 18.
Louisville has swum in three meets this season. The women and men’s teams each finished second to Michigan in the SMU Classic in mid-October between a home dual meet against Xavier and a road trip south to Knoxville to take on Tennessee. The team was ranked seventh in the preseason CSCAA men’s poll and 13th in the women’s, and the men in particular got a big boost when Nicolas Albiero, the reigning NCAA champion in the 200 fly, chose to return for his fifth year of racing for Louisville. Albiero is the son of head coach Arthur Albiero, currently in his 18th season with the program.
COVID-19 has been a constant threat to swimming and diving programs across the United States, although the virus has slowed down over the past two months after a significant surge fueled by the delta variant late in the summer. Louisville was forced to shut down practice early in the season due to issues with the virus, but there had been no reported COVID issues with the Cardinals in more than two months prior to this cancellation.
Louisville has actually competed in four different conferences during Albiero’s tenure: Conference USA, the Big East, the American Athletic Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Louisville men won the program’s first-ever ACC team title last year by edging out six-time defending champion NC State, and the group finished a very strong fifth at the NCAA Championships behind Texas, Cal, Florida and Indiana. The Cardinal women placed 13th on the national level in what was the team’s first NCAAs without Kelsi Dahlia or Mallory Comerford in a decade.
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