For the Penn State men's swimming and diving team, winning the Big Ten championships is not the goal.

"We can't win; we don't have the depth," Penn State assistant swimming coach John Hargis said. "What we want to do is score over 300 points. That's our goal."

The Nittany Lions will start to work toward reaching that goal today beginning at 11 a.m. when they travel to West Lafayette, Ind., for the 2004 Big Ten men's Swimming/Diving championships.

"On the men's side we took a hard look at what we had in terms of depth and talent, and we wanted to set a goal that was realistic but at the same time challenging," Penn State swimming and diving coach Bill Dorenkott said. "We try to stay away from what place we'll finish."

In 12 years in the conference, the Nittany Lions only scored more than 300 five times. This included last yearwhen they scored 316.5 points with a bigger and slightly more talented team. Even then, it was only good enough for sixth place at the Big Ten championships.

The two teams that pose the biggest challenge to the Lions this year are Michigan and Minnesota.

Michigan has established itself as a distance threat, while Minnesota's strength is sprinting.

"They just have the numbers that we don't have. We have our own goals, and we can't control what other teams are going to do," Hargis said. "What we want to do is to have people say, 'Wow, Penn State is really swimming hard out there.' "

The Lions (4-6) finished their season out strong by defeating Rutgers 130-113 and Ohio State 122-121, and Hargis and Dorenkott approves of the strides the team is making at the right time of the season.

"A lot of teams probably would have shut down," Hargis said. "A lot of teams wouldn't have showed the kind of attitude and passion our guys showed. "It was fun to watch."

During the season, the Lions followed a progressive overload model where they would build up the volume and intensity of their training.

During the last few weeks, the Lions have been reversing that process with the goal of peaking in time for the Big Ten championships.

"It's a lot different from a sport like basketball, football or soccer where you've got to get up every week or sometimes twice a week," Dorenkott said. "For us, this is our season. As an Olympic sport, Big Tens and NCAAs are our Olympics, and we want to be at our peak for it."

But the diving team is trying to remain sober -- emotionally sober, that is.

"I don't want to let their inexperience get them on that emotional roller coaster," Penn State diving coach Craig Brown said. "If they're in control of themselves emotionally, they'll be in control of themselves physically, and if they're in control of themselves physically they'll get 6, 7 and 8s every time."

Brown said that if each player on the team gets 6s or better on every dive, the team would score 500 points, thus guaranteeing they will be in the mix.

The players will be on the one-meter board today, the three-meter board tomorrow and the platform event on Saturday.

There will be 10 judges, the coaches from the Big Ten schools, awarding the divers scores ranging from 0 to 10. A group of five will determine the final score for each diver. The final score is determined by dropping the highest and lowest scores, adding up the middle three scores and multiplying that by the degree of difficulty.

The athletes will each do 11 dives and choose from dives from five categories in both the one and three-meter boards The categories are forward, backward, reverse, inward and twisting dives.

"If we do a dive and mess up, we have to focus on the next dive and not let that worry us," diver Mike Alderman said. "As a team, if someone falls off, there's always someone right there who can pick up the slack."

The divers said if they overcome their emotions, they will go far.

"Emotional sobriety I call it," Brown said. The players laugh when I use that term because it's goofy, but we want to stay in control of our emotions all the way through."