Entering their third year of NCAA competition, SFU’s swim teams have come a long way in a short time. The program, which started as one of SFU’s premiere teams, has been marred with ups and downs, but now looks to be a top contender in the NCAA once again.
In their first year of competition, the women’s team made it to the NCAA championship and placed in the top 10, while last season they placed in the top 20. Now, they look to push forward to a new level.
“Our team’s been improving every year and that’s been a goal for us,” explained head coach Liam Donnelly. “[With] the women’s team, our goal is to go down and get back in the top 10; ideally we would like to push into the top five. We’re going to need a full team effort to do that.”
He explains that, in order to do this, the team needs individual qualifiers. In order to place well, a team has to have enough swimmers qualified to represent it at the championship.
“The real challenge is getting the biggest team to qualify as possible. If you’re going to finish in the top five teams in the NCAA, you’re going to need 10 to 12 competitors to get enough points,” explained Donnelly.
In each of the last two seasons, SFU has sent six swimmers from the women’s team to the championship.
Donnelly hopes that SFU’s mix of veteran leadership and fresh blood will help propel them to higher glories: “We’ve got a good mix of returning leaders and freshmen on the women’s team.”
Senior Nicole Cossey, SFU’s 2013-14 female athlete of the year and All-American, returns to lead the team, having broken an NCAA record in the 100-yard freestyle at last season’s championship.
Also returning to wrap up their senior years are All-American Carmen Nam, Alexandria Schofield, and Grace Ni, supplemented by incoming freshmen including Maran Kokoszka and Megan Barrack.
The men’s team, however, has not had the same success — yet.
They enter this season never having qualified for the NCAA championship. This is not for a lack of trying, or even necessarily talent, as returning seniors Hans Heaves and Dmitar Ivanov just narrowly missed the cut, something Donnelly speculates will fire them up this season.
“We had a couple of guys knocking on the doorstep [. . .], it’s very bitter, it’s almost easier to finish at the back of the pack, where you don’t have much hope [of winning],” explained the coach.
The extra motivation for seniors such as Heaves and Ivanov should trickle down to the new talent, which includes freshmen Gabriel Lee and Adrian Vanderhelm, two swimmers the coach believes “have a pretty good shot at qualifying.”
For both teams, though, Donnelly is firm in his belief that they have improved from last season: “[They are] better in every way. The whole purpose of a university is to push your boundaries and your limits, whether it be in academia or athletics [. . .], about thought, thought processes, thinking and research; and we do the same athletically.
“The front-runners and the leaders on our team must continue to get better and the people who have just scraped their way onto it must do the same thing, so we are bound by this [principle],” concluded the coach.
Both teams open their season at home against the University of Puget Sound Loggers on Saturday, October 4.
