This past Saturday, the NMU men’s and women’s swim and dive teams both won at home in their first meet since November. The teams both faced off against UW-Green Bay. UW-GB is currently unranked. NMU men are ranked seventh and the women are ranked eighth. The men outscored their opponent 174-114 while the women scored 190-104. This is also the first time UW-GB has been to Marquette for a swim and dive meet since 2020.
“We’re excited to host them,” Head Coach Heidi Voigt said. “Man, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. We’d come off a training trip and hard weeks of training getting in the last few hard workouts that we need to get done before [the] conference coming up and they really stepped up.”
Out of the four relay teams that swam in the meet on Saturday, three of them broke pool records. Camilla Carbone, Zoe Dekievit, Txell Font Cantarero and Alyssa Bloser broke the women’s 400 medley relay pool record with a time of 3:53.42. Thibault Auger, Wyatt Dickman, Ryan Lund and Leo Nolles set the new men’s pool record for the 400 medley relay with a time of 3:24.20. The men’s pool record for 200 freestyle relay was also broken with a time of 1:22.00 swam by Leo Nolles, Will LaCount, Gabriel Fulconi and Jef Leroux.
The team also saw some individual records broken by both the men’s and women’s side. Carlotta Santi broke the women’s pool record for the 200 freestyle with a time of 1:51.80 and Leo Nolles broke the 50 freestyle and 50 butterfly pool records with times of 20.31 and 22.05.
“The men broke the 200 free record which … had kind of been on their mind and the best part about it is when that idea comes from the athlete … I’m not pushing it on them, they approached us and said, hey, this one [we] want to be one of our goals for the weekend” Voigt said.
As the regular season nears the end for some of the swimmers and divers, others are looking toward the postseason. Diver Abbie Harned is one of the ones who got a pre-qualifying score as well as Lauren Plockmeyer.
On the men’s team, Tobie Stiles broke a pool record from 1975.
“Tobie Stiles just keeps diving like crazy, broke a record, [a] three-meter six dive pool record from 1975,” Voigt said. “And the best part about that is the gentleman that had that record kept emailing me [saying] when’s Tobie going to break this record and he was the first email that I got after the meeting [and he] said, tell Toby congratulations so that was really fun, and I know they’ve been talking a little bit.”
This weekend, the ‘Cats will host the last meet of the regular season as Michigan Tech’s club team comes to NMU. It is also senior night as the team will recognize all of their seniors. The team hopes this meet will help them bring a possible five divers to the pre-qualifying meet.
“It is fun to get another team here, usually it’s kind of an inner squad meet but it’s more [of] an opportunity for us to recognize our seniors,” Voigt said.
The meet will be on Saturday, Jan. 27 at 11 a.m. The team will then travel to the GLIAC championships from Feb. 9-Feb. 12 in Holland, Michigan.
