The Villanova swim and dive team traveled to University Park, PA for their final dual meet of the regular season on Friday evening, Feb. 2. After many hard-fought races, the Wildcats eventually fell to the Nittany Lions with the women finishing behind 196–100 and the men losing 224–74.
“We do that dual meet every year at Penn State, a great Big Ten program,” head coach Rick Simpson said. “I’m not sure if Penn State was expecting us to be that competitive, and you always want to walk out of there with a win, but at least we were walking out saying ‘at least our athletes did the best that they could that night’. As a coaching staff we really felt comfortable about where we were.”
Graduate student Maggie Kleinsmith secured the only first-place finish for the women in the 100 yd breaststroke with a time of 1:04.72. Kleinsmith was also less than a second away from a second place finish in the 200 yd breaststroke finishing at 2:24.76.
Senior free/back swimmer Charlie Hinckley took first for the men in the 1000 yd freestyle, followed by teammates sophomore Patrick Casey in second and freshman Brady Tierney in third. Hinckley also led off the men’s 200 yd freestyle relay team, who took third.
The ‘Cats made up some of the points in close second and third place finishes. Both women’s A and B 200 free relays finished in the top three.
Freshman free/fly swimmer Alyssa McHale finished third in the 100 free, where her time of 52.43 was less than a second shy of first.
Junior free/fly swimmer Lainey Quinones had a series of intense races with a second-place finish in the 200 free, just two seconds behind first. Quinones also had a third-place finish in the 100 backstroke only 0.24 seconds behind second. She came back in the 100 fly, taking second place with a time of 57.11.
“Getting off a three-hour bus ride adds to the challenge,” Simpson said. “We didn’t seem to be impacted at all by the length of the day and the long bus ride. Just looking back and comparing it to previous years, I told the team when we left that if that was a home meet on a Friday night, I don’t know if we would have performed any better, to be quite honest.”
Although the outcome was unfavorable for the ’Cats at Penn State, an exciting day of celebration back home followed the dual meet. Villanova hosted the annual Sprintfest event to honor the team’s graduating seniors.
This year’s Sprintfest took place on Feb. 3 against the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Nine teams of non-swimmers competed in the highly anticipated annual All-Sport relay on Saturday morning.
With representation from the Villanova football, volleyball, water polo, ultimate frisbee, diving, sailing, and club swim teams, the afternoon’s event brought high energy and strong support to the Villanova Swim Complex.
The club swim team walked away with a win for the 2024 relay and left Wildcat fans excited for next year’s rematch.
“This is really much more of a celebration than it is a competition,” Simpson said. “It’s our senior day, so we got a huge crowd for them, and for the rest of the athletes it’s a celebration for the end of a really really tough stretch of the season.”
This weekend’s events concluded Villanova’s regular season as the ‘Cats now begin their taper training for Big East and NCAA championship meets later this month.
“The whole idea is to shape the mentality by what we call ‘swimming up,’” Simpson said. “Performing to a higher level, a higher standard, you kind of recalibrate your thought process that that’s the level of competition you’re aiming towards: the nationally-ranked power five programs. [The athletes’] expectations of themselves are higher and you take that and carry that into a conference championship.”
The Wildcats will compete in the Big East Championships in Indianapolis, Ind. starting on Feb. 28.
