Swimcloud

Monmouth Brings Back Swimming

Monmouth University Vice President and Director of Athletics Dr. Marilyn McNeil, after consulting with the University’s Trustees, has announced that the men’s and women’s swimming programs will be reintroduced as NCAA Division I sports at the school, with regular season competition starting in Fall 2015.  The move was made as a part of Monmouth's migration to the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.

The Hawks will join current full MAAC members Canisius, Fairfield, Iona, Manhattan, Marist, Niagara, Rider and Saint Peter’s in offering both men’s and women’s swimming. Full MAAC member Siena also has a women’s team, while Bryant is an associate member of the MAAC on the men’s side.

Speaking to Monmouth's student newspaper The Outlook, Senior Associate Athletics Director Jeff Stapleton explained that the addition of swimming to meet the MAAC's core sports requirement of fourteen men's and women's teams and that the school needed to add volleyball or swimming.  Athletics Director Marilyn McNeil told The Outlook explained why swimming came out a winner:

Because we have the pool. Because we are on the shore. Because we’ve had a fabulous swimming program in the past, it just made sense that swimming was the sport that we should go back to. We need to pull our alumni back and pull our friends back,” said McNeil.

McNeil explained, “We actually did some due diligence, we studied it for over a year trying to figure out what would be the best thing that we could do. We also looked at the requirement and sort of thought about the sports that we were short of and what does it mean for the Jersey Shore. Swimming was the one that came forward and we really only had to add women’s swimming. It ended up that we wanted to add a sport.”

Monmouth has a storied tradition of swimming excellence, featuring gold medal winners at several levels, including the Olympics. Six members of its Athletics Hall of Fame were members of the swimming program, including Coach Richard Steadman, for whom Monmouth’s natatorium is named. The 1974 Monmouth men’s and women’s swimming teams were recently honored as teams of distinction at this year’s Monmouth Athletics Hall of Fame dinner.

The 1974 men’s and women’s swimming teams featured an unprecedented level of team and individual success at Monmouth. The men’s and women’s team each won NAIA & AIAW National Championships and earned seventh place finishes at the NCAA national meet. The squad featured 16 combined All-Americans and 22 qualifiers for the National Championships. A combined 30 Monmouth swimming records were set during the 1974 season and the team would feature four future National Champions and one future Olympic Champion in 1976 gold medalist Wendy Boglioli.

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