SJU Johnnies Swim and Dive

Hello Johnnie Swim and Dive fans and alumni! I hope you are doing well, happy new year! As we turn the page on 2024, we look back on what we accomplished and look forward to our MIAC Championships of 2025. This has been an historic season thus far and we look forward to a great finish in February!

As the team sits now, we are 5-1 in dual meets, with our only lose coming against Division II top 10 ranked St. Cloud State. We had a great ending to the fall semester with some great swims at the Rochester Invitational in December. After Christmas break, we took our annual trip to Puerto Rico for a week and have come back in great shape ready to finish off the end of the season strong. Spending 7 days in San Juan is nice when it’s so cold up here in Minnesota, but it also gives our guys some time to focus on training. We are able to train at a LCM pool which our guys have learned to appreciate as it gives us great training opportunities. The training was great, the beach was great, and now we return to push hard towards the end of the season and MIAC Championship.

January is a gauntlet of meets as we prepare for MIACs. Last weekend was our dual against St. Cloud State, which we lost, but had some great performances. This upcoming weekend (Saturday, January 25) we are going down to Northfield for a dual against Carleton, and the following weekend we end our dual meet schedule with a home meet against Gustavus (2/1/25), which is our senior night. We would love to see some Johnnie alum and fans at the meets down the stretch, please let us know if you are able to make it to the meets!

We have performed well to this point in the season, but we have not reached out full potential yet. Our midseason meet was full of great performances as a team including a 1st place finish at the meet in the 1650 (15:54.60) from Brayden Slavik which is good enough for 24th in the country in Division III. From the same meet our 400 Free Relay of Carter Larson, Liam Noble, Colby Kern, and Carsten Reuter went 3:04.98 which is good enough for 36th in the country. Our 200 Free and 800 Free relays are currently ranked 54th and 47th respectively. We are excited for the end of the season taper to see if we can improve on those rankings and move our team back into the national meet for the first time since 2012. Eli Grabinski took third on both boards at the Rochester Invitational as well with scores that will qualify him for the NCAA Regional Championships for the fourth year in a row.

Just this past weekend Cody Watts (SO) also got his first Regional Qualifying score as well against St. Cloud State, needing just one more to officially qualify for the meet, he’s looking forward to several chances including the MIAC Championships to secure that second score. We also had several great swims during the dual with St. Cloud including an un-tapered, non tech suit relay split of 20.80 out of Colby Kern on our 200 Freestyle Relay at the end of the meet. Our guys are really rounding into form and should be ready for some great competitions the next couple of weeks.

All in all, we are preparing for the most exciting portion of the season. The guys are looking good and ready to swim and dive well at the end of the season. We look forward to seeing you at the Palestra or down at the U of M for our MIAC Championships. I will send more information soon, but I would love a chance to meet up with alumni one of the nights down at MIACs. Please let me know if you are planning on going and we can set a time and place to have an alumni gathering. Go Johnnies!