Pleasant Prairie, Wis. -- After Wednesday's diving competitions, the 2024 CCIW Swimming & Diving Championships got underway in earnest on Thursday with day one of the swimming events taking place. Wheaton had one individual event champion this evening and two relay team victories to help lay the foundation for this weekend's competition. After the first day of swimming scores were tallied, the reigning conference champion Wheaton women's team finds itself in second place with a total of 196 points, while Augustana raced out to a healthy lead and currently sits on 307 points. The Thunder men, seeking their first CCIW crown since 2014, are in third place after Thursday's competitions, having earned 281 points. Carthage, which saw its five-year streak of conference championships come to an end last year, sits atop the men's standings thus far with 301 points, while reigning winners Augustana are only five points behind in second. With fourth-placed Illinois Wesleyan registering 114 points tonight, there is already notable separation between the top three men's teams and the rest of the field.
In the very first event of this year's conference finals, the Wheaton relay team of
AJ Staiti,
Anthony Fitzgerald,
Kael Gannon, and
Ben Coley swam to a second-placed finish in the men's 200 yard freestyle relay, missing out on the top spot by a miniscule .21-second margin. But the Thunder did begin the CCIW Championships with a relay victory courtesy of the women's quartet of
Sophie Pelling,
Katie Yonan,
Scottie McKeaney, and
Carolyn Bubar (
podium picture below), who teamed up to capture the 200 free relay with a combined time of 1:36.35, marking the third-consecutive year that a Wheaton unit has won the women's 200 freestyle relay. Yonan (
pictured right) has been a part of all three victorious squads.
Isaac Eilmes secured a third-place showing in his 500 yard freestyle final via a time of 4:40.34, while
Lucas Edwards topped the field in the B final of the same event. Yonan (
pictured right) then followed up her relay medal collection with a runner-up placement in the women's 500 free after posting a time mark of 5:06.51.
Next came Wheaton's lone solo event victory in an A final on Thursday, and unsurprisingly, it arrived at the hands of the All-American and two-time CCIW Men's Swimming Athlete of the Year,
Anthony Fitzgerald. The senior swept past the challenging 200 yard IM field with a time mark of 1:48.60 to earn NCAA B cut and Q23 status and set a new CCIW record time in the process (
podium photo below at left). The impressive achievement saw Fitzgerald not only repeat his win in the 200 IM from 2023, but improve upon last year's record-setting time by more than a second.
The accomplished freshman,
Tess Boyer, opened her first collegiate conference championships with a runner-up placement in the women's 200 yard IM. The three-time CCIW Women's Swimming Student-Athlete of the Week registered a mark of 2:08.32 to come in only .70 second behind the first-placed IWU Titan swimmer. Teammate
Sophie Pelling captured third place in her 50 yard freestyle event via a time of 24.33 seconds, just .16 off of top spot.
Wheaton's third victory of the first day came in the final event on the men's side - the 400 yard medley relay. Fitzgerald combined with
Connor Davis,
Kael Gannon, and
Michael O'Connor to post a winning time of 3:20.59 and keep the event in Wheaton's locker for the third year in a row. Just as Yonan has featured on three-straight triumphant relay teams for the Thunder women, Fitzgerald has been a fixture on the last three winning quartets in the men's 400 medley. A four-woman pairing of
Savannah Jeffery, Boyer, Bubar, and Yonan swam to a third-placed showing in the day's last event, the women's 400 yard medley relay, to account for the final points for the Thunder women's team on Thursday.
Day two of the swimming competitions and day three of the Championships will begin at 10:30 AM on Friday with prelims, and event finals will take place starting at 6 PM in Pleasant Prairie.
