Another year of dominance is in favor of the Rowan women’s swimming and diving team.
The Profs captured their second consecutive New Jersey Athletic Conference (NJAC) title under four-year head coach Brad Bowser this past Saturday against The College of New Jersey. Rowan won 220-77, as this was their highest scoring meet of the season and the fourth time they’ve defeated an NJAC opponent by more than 100 points.
Bowser was nothing short of proud of his team for accomplishing the feature this year.
“It means a lot,” Bowser said. “What the girls put together this year, looking at every team in the NJAC, for them to really win handedly across the board against the five other programs shows that this team is about. They’ve shown improvement and getting themselves ready for the big thing for us, which is the NCAA’s.”
Now, usually this would be the part where stats from the conference-clinching meet against TCNJ would be inserted, but Bowser pretty much summed up everything he liked (which was basically everything the Profs did) during our interview, so here’s that.
“I liked to see Carlee Timmins hopping out of the 1,000 [freestyle] and right into the 200 freestyle and scoring points for us there,” Bowser said. “Alex Bambrick out of the 1,000 [freestyle] and into the 100 backstroke with not much time between races. Miranda [Coughlan] going and winning the 50 and 100 freestyles as well as both the relay’s [200 medley and 400 freestyle]. I’d say the medley relay going one-two to start the meet was huge, as well as Emily Kopchick in the 100 breaststroke. It was a great meet, and we had Veronica Alferez becoming Rookie of the Week.”
Although there is just one more meet before the Metropolitan Championships from Feb. 16-18, “Mets” is the main focus before the NCAA Division III Championships at the end of the season. The brown and gold came in second last season in the Mets, and Bowser says that his team has to do a lot of reflecting as to where they are as a team this year compared to last in order to be successful this time around.
“The goal obviously is to win, but the main thing is for us to be better than where we were at last year. We have to keep on plugging away with the program to make ourselves better. That’s what I look at,” he said. “Are the swimmers getting better individually? Are they acting together as a team better and are they bringing a relationship status towards making this program an elite program within Division III?”
Rowan hosts the United States Merchant Marine Academy this Saturday at 1 p.m. in their last home meet of the season.
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