As the Penn State men's swimming and diving team's season nears its end, practices become shorter and physical training gets lighter -- but don't let that fool you.

The rest is needed, as swimmers across the country look to be at their peak. This weekend, champions of some of the best swimming leagues in the country will be decided.

The Big Ten is one of those leagues. The conference boasts seven of the nation's top-25 teams, several Olympic medal winners and eight-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps, who is a volunteer assistant coach for No. 5 Michigan.

Starting at noon today and continuing through Saturday, the Nittany Lions will compete in the same pool as those medal winners, along with the rest of the Big Ten, when they travel to Minneapolis, site of this year's conference championships.

Michigan and No. 6 Minnesota are the heavy favorites to win the conference. The Golden Gophers have won three of the last four Big Ten titles, including last season when they won with a score of 712.5. The Wolverines, complete with several Olympians on the roster, return much of the team that finished second to the Gophers last season.

Given the stockpile of talent at the top of the conference, the unranked Lions head to Minnesota not with the intent of winning, but with the goal of improving upon the 299.5 points they scored last season, placing them seventh.

"We'd like to exceed our point total from a year ago, which will be a challenge. The goal [last year] was 300. We put up 299.5," Penn State coach Bill Dorenkott said. "It will be a stretch for our guys to score more than 300 points this year. That's a challenge, and it's not an easy one."

The makeup of this year's squad is significantly different than the one the Lions sent to the Big Ten meet last year. Last season, Todd Minnier placed in the top eight of every event in which he participated, earning a large portion of the points the Lions scored. This season, the team does not have a dominant swimmer like Minnier, who graduated, which makes it harder to score the big points rewarded to the top finishers in all 21 events.

"It will be a lot harder [to score 300]. Last year, we had Todd, who was someone we could always count on," junior Shawn McLin said. "He was in all the relays, so this year, it's going to take more of a team effort, and people are going to have to move up."

Winning each event does not necessarily guarantee a conference crown, but having multiple swimmers finish in the points certainly helps.

The five relay events present the easiest opportunities for the Lions to gain points as each Big Ten team enters just one foursome to compete in each relay. Points are handed out to every team that participates, with the first-place team earning 40 points, second place 34, all the way down to the 11th-place relay team, which gets 12.

The remaining individual events provide opportunities for swimmers to improve their standing in the conference by swimming times fast enough to reach the final 16. Once in the finals, swimmers compete for places one to 16, with points descending from 20 for first place down to one for last place.

These individual are the events where the Lions hope to shave time off of their personal bests and improve upon their conference finish last season.

"We won the championship with the guys in 1999 -- there have only been three teams in the past 10 years that have won a Big Ten championship," Dorenkott said. "It takes little victories. That's what we're looking for this weekend. Some experience, some growth."