This past week, Brown (4-3) hosted the annual Ivy League Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships, placing fourth with 1036 points. The Bears narrowly lost to Yale, which tallied 1069 points for third place, while Harvard (1317.5 points) and Princeton (1403 points) commanded second- and first-place finishes, respectively.
Despite missing out on the top three overall, Bruno displayed their prowess in short- and middle-distance swimming, with multiple podium placements in individual and relay events. During the meet’s inaugural races on Wednesday, Jenna Reznicek ’25, Gillian Tu ’27, Lillian Klinginsmith ’26 and Sam Scott ’24 took third in the 200 medley with a time of 1:37.84, shattering the program’s record of 1:38.73, which was set in 2017.
“We knew each person in the relay would have to execute a ‘best possible scenario’ split,” Reznicek wrote in an email to The Herald. “So watching each girl hit that ‘best possible scenario’ split, one after another, was such a proud and exhilarating feeling. As our final freestyle legs swam in, it was so exciting watching the scoreboard and watching the time stop under the previous school record time.”
Later in the day, two other program records fell in one race. Zehra Bilgin ’25, Morgan Lukinac ’26, Anna Podurgiel ’25 and Kelly Dolce ’26 swam a combined 7:08.77 in the 800 freestyle relay to finish second to Princeton, beating the record set in 2023 by more than three seconds. Lukinac herself set a Bruno record in the 200 freestyle as part of the relay.
“My favorite race of the meet was definitely the 800 freestyle relay,” Lukinac wrote in an email to The Herald. “My main training partners, Kelly Dolce, Anna Podurgiel and Zehra Duru Bilgin push me the most every single day, and I am so grateful to have them all together in one relay.”
“The 800 free relay was the first event of the meet for us, so we were fresh and the energy on deck was electric,” Lukinac added. “It was so fun to be neck-and-neck with Princeton's relay, (and) it was a great race.”
The eight Bruno swimmers who represented the first two relay races performed exceptionally well for the remainder of the meet. Of the 12 program records broken in this year’s championships, they contributed to nine of them, either as individual competitors or relay members.
In Thursday’s 200 freestyle relay, Scott, Lukinac, Dolce and Bilgin logged a 1:30.22 (a Bruno best) to take third, trailing behind Harvard and Princeton squads that set new pool and Ivy record times. In the 50 freestyle, Scott and Lukinac clinched third and fourth place, respectively.
In the one-meter diving final, Isabella George ’27 scored 274.40 to place fifth. In the three-meter diving contest, Elena Yeh ’26 placed eighth with a final score of 216.90.
Friday’s results arguably featured the most surprising win for Brown in the entire championship. In the 100 butterfly finals, Klinginsmith, who had placed sixth with a time of 53.56 seconds in the preliminaries, not only shaved off a full second — completing the race in 52.53 seconds — but also edged out Harvard’s Sydney Lu by 0.02 seconds to win first place.
The day concluded with Lukinac winning gold in the 200 freestyle and Reznicek, Yu, Klinginsmith and Lukinac collecting bronze in the 400 medley relay.
Reznicek also placed second in the 100 backstroke. The race “has become a very competitive event in the Ivy League in the past couple of years,” Reznicek wrote in an email to The Herald. “So from the beginning of the season, knowing the high level of talent of the girls I would be swimming against at the end of the season motivated me to push myself in practice.”
On the final day, the Bears registered three more program records. Lukinac finished second in the 100 freestyle at 48.53 seconds, then joined Klinginsmith, Dolce and Bilgin to take second in the 400 freestyle relay. Bilgin would conclude the championships for Brown by finishing third in the 200 butterfly.
