Back in May, Marquette University announced that they were adding women’s swimming as the 17th varsity sport offered by the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics. More importantly, that announcement stated that the program was scheduled to begin competition as early as the 2025-26 season.
Today is September 15th. Why do I point that out? Because of this line in the original Marquette press release, emphasis mine:
The women’s swimming season runs from mid-September through early March, capped by the
league championship meet at a neutral site in late February.
You don’t get more mid-September than the 15th day of a 30 day month, and the fact of the matter is that Marquette does not have a women’s swimming team. They have a press release saying they have one and that a locker room exists for said team, and they have links on GoMarquette.com to point you to a schedule and a roster, but they don’t actually have a team. In order to have a team, you have to have a head coach, and Marquette doesn’t have one. If you don’t have a head coach, they haven’t recruited any athletes or held an on-campus tryout, and therefore: No coach = no athletes = no team.
Why did Marquette announce that they were starting a swimming team in 2025-26? Why did they announce that in May of 2025, approximately two months after the end of the swimming athletic calendar according to their own press release? Why did they announce in May 2025, as I noted, it would seem that the plans to build the swim team locker room date all the way back to 2022? You’d think that the smart and logical thing to do would have been to make this announcement about a year ago so that when the 2024-25 swimming season wound down and their coaching carousel wound up, you were right in the thick of things relative to hiring a coach. That could have made the timeline to start this school year work, but instead, Marquette and very specifically athletic director Mike Broeker did not do that, and here we are.
The best case scenario is that someone, probably multiple someones, in Marquette’s administration grossly overestimated the likelihood that they would be able to interview and hire a head coach, a position that is still listed as open and available since May 9th, 2025, on Marquette’s HR website by the way, long before this school year started. The worst case scenario is that Marquette is completely half-assing this expansion of women’s athletics and competition. I guess we’ll just wait til the spring and hope that there’s an announcement of a coach then?
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