Six individual national wins. Victory in all five relays. National team champs (for the third year in a row!). It was business as usual for the University of Virginia in March at the NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championship in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Senior Kate Douglass won three individual national championships (200-meter individual medley, 100 butterfly, 200 breaststroke), while Gretchen Walsh won two (100 backstroke, 100 freestyle). And Walsh’s older sister, Alex, who along with Douglass medaled at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, won the 400 IM. As a team, the Hoos swept the relays with wins in the 200 medley, the 800 free, the 200 free, the 400 medley, and the 400 free.
Before the meet, Head Coach Todd DeSorbo said, “Arguably, we’ve got the best team that we’ve ever had here at UVA, so I feel really good.”
Turns out DeSorbo had reason to feel good: By meet’s end, Virginia’s nearest competitor, the University of Texas, had scored 414.5 team points to UVA’s 541.5. And in case the Cavs’ foes thought they had a chance to catch UVA, the 400-meter freestyle relay team put an exclamation point on the Hoos’ performance during the competition’s final event with a time of 3:05.85, which set a new NCAA and American record. It also made UVA the first team since Stanford in 2018 to sweep all five relays at the national championships.
After the meet, DeSorbo talked to C-VILLE about saying goodbye to the seniors on his team. “They believed and trusted immediately, and were just really excited to be a part of the potential rise of our program. And they’ve all just been such great people and influences and leaders on our team. … They’re definitely gonna leave a lasting legacy, and they play a significant role in where we are today.”
But Gretchen Walsh, who will be a junior next year, is already looking toward 2024, when she hopes to help UVA match Stanford’s 1995 feat of winning four straight NCAA Swimming & Diving titles. “I think we can do it,” she said in April. “We’re creating a legacy, and that’s one of the coolest things about this experience.”
To help make a four-peat a reality, Walsh pointed to her list of individual goals for next season: Hit 20.5 seconds in the 50 freestyle and 47 seconds in the 100 backstroke—and add another American record by beating 45.56 seconds in the 100 freestyle. Then there’s that Olympic rings tattoo: Silver-medalist Alex Walsh refuses to get her rings tattoo until her sister, who failed to qualify for the 2020 Olympic team the summer before she arrived at UVA, also medals at the Olympics (Gretchen’s fourth-grade self-portrait was of her standing on the Olympic blocks).
“Since coming into UVA, having this change and this new environment, I feel a lot more confident going into next summer, in my abilities and my training, all around,” Gretchen Walsh said. “I think [an Olympic medal] is definitely feasible.”