EVANSVILLE, Ind. – The University of Evansville women’s swimming and diving will head to Iowa City, Iowa on Wednesday to take part in the 2022 Missouri Valley Conference Swimming & Diving Championships, hosted by the University of Northern Iowa. The Valley Championships will begin Wednesday at 6 p.m. and continue through Saturday night.
The UE women will enter the league championships off of a regular-season which saw the Purple Aces go 5-2 in dual meet action and pick up a second-place finish at the A3 Performance Invitational in Carbondale, Illinois back in November. Evansville set three school records during the course of the regular-season, and will be looking to take down more at the Valley Championships.
“The ladies are ready,” said UE head swimming coach Stuart Wilson. “They were pretty relaxed and confident after leaving campus for Iowa. They have been training well and I expect to see some great performances from the ladies this week.”
Junior Sarah Jahns (Lilburn, Ga./Parkview) lowered UE’s record in the 200-yard backstroke back in November, and will attempt to lower it even further this week. Fellow junior Maya Cunningham (Yakima, Wash./Eisenhower) will also try to lower her own school records in both the 200-yard butterfly and 400-yard IM this weekend. Freshman Sveva Brugnoli (Rome, Italy) made history in November by breaking a more than 20-year-old record in the 200 IM and will look to better that and the record in the 100-yard butterfly as well.
In all, UE’s roster features six women who currently own school records at Evansville. That group includes the quartet of Cunningham, junior Sage Moore (Lexington, Ohio/Lexington), senior Jessie Steele (Houston, Texas/Klein) and sophomore Iryna Tsesiul (Minsk, Belarus), who set the school record in the 400-yard Medley Relay at the 2021 Valley Championships. UE also features a group of nine women who have earned honorable mention all-MVC honors in the past, including three divers in seniors Maggie Franz (Mundelein, Ill./Mundelein), Fae Keighley (Johannesburg, South Africa) and Sarah Kempf (Greenwood, Ind./Center Grove).
