After a three-peat of Atlantic 10 championships wins, swimming and diving face a transitional season with the absence of top performers from the previous season, a fresh batch of recruits and a new leader.
The team added ten new players, a diverse group of athletes all the way from Idaho to Israel in this year’s recruiting class, filling in the gaps from the transfers of A-10 championship top point scorer Zoe Schneider and NCAA qualifier Ava DeAngelis during the offseason. The team will train and compete under newly hired Head Coach Francisco Rego, who replaced reigning A-10 Coach of the Year Brian Thomas after his six-year tenure that brought home nine A-10 championship titles.
The ten recruits consist of five men, one graduate transfer and four first-years, and five women, who are all first-years.
Australia-born graduate student Elliot Irwin was named the 2024 Male Summit League Swimmer of the Year during his time at Lindenwood University before transferring to GW. His fastest time, 19.25, in the 50-yard free would be an A-10 conference record.
Freshman backstroke specialist Shae Stratton’s best time of 48.42 in the 100-yard backstroke would have been good for third at last year’s A-10 championships.
With the breaststroke excellence of DeAngelis now at Ohio State, first-years Meg Cleaver, Bryce Scully and Sori Ebrahimi will be tasked with filling the gaps left behind in the event.
On the diving board, all seven divers are returning next year, including junior Olivia Paquette who holds the school record for a six-dive score in the 3-meter dive.
Swimmers who transferred said they’re optimistic for the team they’re leaving behind but are content with their decision to leave after experiencing frustration with official’s plans to fill in the Smith Center pool.
Schneider, who swims long freestyle and individual medleys, transferred to the University of Missouri this fall and said GW’s new recruits could build on the team’s success.
“We have a lot of fast swimmers coming in, so they’re just gonna elevate the team to another level,” Schneider said.
She said she left the team after growing frustrated with the constantly evolving plans that administrators presented to the team, including proposed practice schedules that conflicted with class times and required long commutes. She said she and her teammates were largely filled with disbelief when then-Athletic Director Tanya Vogel announced the plans to fill in the Smith Center pool in a Sept. 18 meeting with the team.
Officials intended to build practice facilities for the basketball teams over the filled pools.
“With what they gave us originally, there wasn’t a way that I was going to be able to be happy, healthy and continue to swim at the level that I wanted to by staying at GW,” Schneider said.
Schneider said that the team heard very little from administration about plans to fill in the pool from the initial September meeting until February, a period the team called an “information blackout.” Although plans to fill in the pool have been scrapped for now, she said she was still not satisfactorily guaranteed that the pool would remain throughout her senior year.
She said she’s looking forward to the increased competition in the SEC, where Missouri finished 11th out of 12 teams at SEC championships last year.
With Schneider’s departure, the Revolutionaries lost a versatile swimmer. However, the team was able to retain other top performers. Distance swimmer Ava Topolewski, who holds the school record in the 1650-yard freestyle, initially considered leaving the team after the learning of officials’ plans to fill in the pool. Swimming blog SwimSwam reported that Topolewski had entered the transfer portal but subsequently decided to stay.
Swimmer Ralf Roose, who transferred to Kentucky after spending the spring semester at GW and winning the 200-yard breaststroke at A-10 championships, said he didn’t know he wanted to transfer for certain until after A-10 championships. He said he was worried about being able to train off campus while still fitting in classes and getting proper rest.
“Nobody really liked the uncertainty,” said Roose. “I would like to guess that a lot of people had thoughts of transferring.”
