By Mark Morales
Staff Reproter
The Sacred Heart University women’s swimming and diving team finished their NEC Championship meet last week.
The event began on Feb. 15 and continued until Feb. 18 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
Cambridge, Mass.
The women came in sixth place with 214.5 total points in the championship meet and ended up breaking 13 school records.
“Just seeing them hit their goals and their achievements definitely makes our coaching staff very happy. As long as they’re happy, we’re happy and we’re a very young team so they didn’t hit their ceiling yet. They’re only going to get better,” said head coach John Spadafina.
As their 2016-17 season came to an end, the swimmers had a lot of positive feedback as they reflected upon the past season and championship.
“I think we all worked really hard to deserve moving up. We all push each other equally as hard,” said sophomore Jessica Poole.
The team has noticed their improvement from last year to their current season.
“We upped our points by a lot this year based on what we got last year,” said freshman Lauren Somers. “We also had a lot of people move on to finals. 36 of us made it back to swim again and that was a big deal.”
After finishing their season at 9-2 overall and placing sixth in the NEC Championship, the swimmers are leaning on experience as a major factor to improve for next season.
“We’re a young team and I think that experience is going to help a lot of people. We were new to a lot of things and I think as we just keep working, as we keep on this path, we’re going to see even better results because people will become more seasoned,” said junior Anna Brown.
These results are in their grasp for the future.
“Our growth as a team this year was a really big in terms of our dual meet record and having such a young team. We’re really shaping up into the kind of team mentally and as we see in our results, we want to be moving forward,” said Brown.
Somers, Poole and Brown were three of the swimmers who broke 13 school records throughout the championship meet.
“I think we all had a really good season together,” said Poole.
The Sacred Heart University women’s swimming and diving team will look to continue their growth as a team next October as the 2017-18 season begins.
