The team will start competition in the 2025-26 school year, which sounds a wee bit crazy
Well, let’s just turn it over to the official Marquette University press release:
Marquette University Department of Intercollegiate Athletics will add women’s swimming as its 17th varsity sport, with the program scheduled to begin competition as early as the 2025-26 season, Vice President and Director of Athletics Mike Broeker announced Wednesday afternoon.
The program will compete in the BIG EAST Conference Championships but will not feature a diving program. Nearly 200 NCAA Division I institutions (over 5,000 student-athletes) sponsor women’s swimming, including fellow league members Butler, UConn, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, Villanova and Xavier.
Did not have “add a new sport” on my list of things that Mike Broeker would be doing as athletic director, but also it seems that this has been on the table for a while now. We’ll get into it in a second. First, quotes from MU’s still relatively new athletic director:
“Marquette Athletics is uniquely positioned to offer women’s swimming student-athletes a transformative experience, combining quality training and competition with a proven history of academic achievement for our student-athletes,” said Broeker. “Adding women’s swimming will improve gender equity in athletics and provide a revenue generation opportunity for the university, while offering a competitive Division 1 experience for our student-athletes. It’s a win-win for our department and university.”
And, believe it or not, we’ve got quotes from Marquette vice president of enrollment management Brian Troyer:
“As we implement our sustainable, mission-aligned, multi-year enrollment strategy, Athletics has been a key partner in helping demonstrate how Marquette’s transformational educational experience can be accessible to a broad range of students, including our Division I student-athletes,” said Brian Troyer, vice president, enrollment management.
One thing that’s not in this press release on GoMarquette.com or the FAQ at the bottom of the press release OR the Marquette Today version of the press release? A single solitary word about scholarship support for women’s swimming. Given that Marquette had already announced that track & field was going to have completely eliminated scholarship support by the start of next school year, I find it hard to believe that they’re introducing a new sport AND providing scholarships for the athletes involved. The fact that competition is beginning immediately next school year sounds an awful lot like the first team members will not be recruited athletes but in fact women otherwise enrolled at Marquette who want to be on the swim team, and the inclusion of quotes from Troyer about a “sustainable, mission-aligned, multi-year enrollment strategy” just accentuates the point that this seems to be a way to generate students who are paying full price tuition.
Let’s move on to how this will actually work. Back to the press release:
The team will train and compete in the recently renovated Wellness + Helfaer Recreation facility (opened in January 2025). The building features a six-lane, 25-yard pool, seating for nearly 150 spectators, a dedicated team locker room and office for the two-member coaching staff. The facility will have the ability to host dual competitions, but any larger meets would take place off campus.
The newly re-opened Wellness + Rec Center just magically has a dedicated team locker room attached to the pool, you say? The Rec Center closed on December 16, 2022, the building was mostly gutted and rebuilt, with the pool moving within the footprint from along 16th Street to along 17th Street. Major renovation, to say the least, and so I think that we have to say that the idea of having a women’s swim team was hatched long before that mid-December closure. If the team locker room was in the finalized construction plans, then this has been on deck since sometimes in 2022 at the absolute latest, perhaps earlier…… which is fascinating, seeing as the Marquette Wire reported on the shutdown of track scholarships in January of 2023.
As you can see from up top, Marquette Golden Eagles women’s swimming will compete in the Big East, making it an 8 team conference for that sport. I took a quick spin through the schedules for the other seven teams for the 2024-25 school year. The other teams participated in somewhere between five and 10 dual meets — meaning one school vs one other school, either home or away — and at least one invitational type meet that wasn’t the Big East Championships of at least six teams. It’s reasonable to think that there will be a couple of home meets at Wellness + Rec in the 2025-26 season, but we’ll have to wait to see what happens down the road.
As for whether or not Marquette can be competitive right away? Well, that’s slightly complicated. Officially, the sport is swimming & diving, and Marquette is not going to participate in diving at all. That’s team points being left on the table at the events. However, for the NCAA championships this year, it would appear that only one woman — Seton Hall’s Alexandra Waggoner — qualified to compete. That means that the competitors in the Big East are generally speaking not quite capable of competing for national championships, which is good news for Marquette as a start up program. The bad news is that Villanova won their 12th straight Big East title in 2025, edging out UConn, 1,588 points to 1,516 points. Whoever is eventually hired to coach this team — and clock’s ticking, the Big East handed out the first weekly honors in the sport in October this past season — is probably facing an uphill battle to to get the team even into the top half of the standings at the Big East championships.
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