Founded in October 2012, the Saint Louis University Swim Club finished their first season of competition earlier this month. The club, started by sophomore Alec Schenk, has already grown into one of the largest and most popular club sports on SLU’s campus.
“I was an orientation leader over the summer and [swam] for almost 10 years, and a student asked me if they had a club swim team here,” Schenk said. “And it made me realize that there were probably students on campus here that would be interested in starting one up. I put out an interest form over the summer and had almost 110 people filled it out, and [the club] just took off from there.”
Being a club sport, the SLU Swim Club still has practices three times per week and meets against other clubs on weekends, but the atmosphere is much more laid back than you would find on an NCAA Division I squad.
“One thing I really like about our team is that it is very laid back,” Schenk said. “There are no requirements for practices or for competitions… It’s pretty much whatever the swimmer wants to make of it.”
With around 70 members, a unique facet to the SLU Swim Club is that it has members of all different swimming skill levels, from novices to grad students who competed at the Division I level at other schools.
“We have people who could have definitely swum in college, we even have one guy who is a med student here who swam for Southern Methodist University for three years on the varsity team as well as some who swam for the SLU swim team,” Schenk said. “At the same time, I dragged some friends into it who had never swum a competitive lap in their lives. No matter what your skill level is you can find a fit with the team.”
The club uses four separate lanes during practice based on a person’s experience and skill level, which allows the beginners to swim together while the experienced swimmers can compete and thrive off each other.
In its first year, the club competed in four tournaments, including the Mizzou Halloween Invitational, Indiana University Hoosier Invitational, Northwestern Invitational and the University of Illinois Invitational. The SLU Swim Club was meet champion at the Northwestern Invitational and finished in the top five in each other invitational it competed in.
“It’s an awesome sense of camaraderie. We always eat well after the meets, which is important,” Schenk said. “ It’s all about the team effort. At the Northwestern Invitational we were a brand new team and didn’t have any expectations on how we would place, but we actually won the entire meet, which was awesome.”
As for how the club plans on building on this year’s successes and expanding the club even further, Schenk has a few ideas.
“One thing about this year was we started in October because the pool was closed and a lot of people already had their groups picked out for what they wanted to do so I think we can be even bigger,” he said. “There is really no limit to how many people we can have.”
In addition to expanding the size of the group, Schenk has high hopes for their performance.
“One of our goals for next year is to go to all of the meets and place really well,” he said. “We did really well at Northwestern but I think we can have that caliber of swimming at every event.”
