By Jeremy Garner
With a score of 603.5 points, the SCAD Women’s swim team won the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletes, or NAIA, Swimming and Diving National Championship at the Columbus Aquatics Center in Columbus, Georgia. The team scored so well they knew going into the final events they had already won the recent 2018 championship.
“Coach Bill had calculated the points before we went into the last events,” said Julie Henninger, a SCAD junior studying Visual Effects. “So, the last couple of events were more relaxed and fun!” Henninger was top 8 in all her events, giving her 8 NAIA-best eight All-American honors. She’s one of three swimmers at the meet to do so.
“It took an entire village to win this,” Anne Weber-Callahan, a SCAD junior studying furniture design with a minor in historic preservation. Henninger, even with her 8 honors, only scored 43.5 points. No one swimmer can win alone. The second-place school, Olivet Nazarene, finished with 519 points. The third-place team, the University of Cumberland, scored only 319 points. That left SCAD’s women’s swim team with a wide margin for the win.
This is the fourth time they have won the championship, the previous years being: 2006, 2010, and 2016. Henninger and Weber-Callahan were freshmen in 2016, making 2018 their second year as NAIA national champions. Anne reflected on her first win at SCAD, “As a freshman, you’re just a small little guppy fish, and winning that year was amazing. So inspiring.”
2017 was close for the ladies, Henninger told me the team scored well, but fell short, at “like 6 points behind.” She lamented that the only reason they lost was because the other team had divers.
Sara Lacusky, a SCAD junior studying fashion with a minor in fashion marketing, was another top scorer on the team. This was only her second-year swimming with SCAD, so she didn’t have the experience of being with the team in 2016 when they won then. She transferred to SCAD from a D1 swim school her sophomore year. I asked her what it was like going from D1 to NAIA, “This team is closer, like a big family,” Lacusky said.
The family is constantly changing as people graduate. “We’re losing some fast seniors, like Rebecca Justus and Cadie Crow,” Weber-Callahan told me. The seniors aren’t just fast swimmers being lost. They’re inspirations for the whole team.
Now it’s up to the new crop of seniors like Weber-Callahan, Lacusky, and Henninger, to inspire the incoming freshmen and the remaining underclassmen. According to Lacusky, “[The team] has some good recruits coming in.” The SCAD’s women’s swim team is already looking forward to their (tentative) 2019 victory.
