Playing to Win

Top Row (L/R): Quinn Weygandt ’26, Aadhi Raja ’27, Chad Kemmerer ’25, Joshua Leinwand ’27, Sarah Cooper ’26, Abigail Love ’25.

Middle Row (L/R): Benjamin Buchman ’25, Katie Kerman ’26, Sarah Schab ’25, Alyssa Hayashi ’25, Angelina Heminway ’26, Ruthie Njagi ’25, Tate Garcia ’26.

Front Row (L/R): Ania Wong ‘28, Joseph Eyiolowope ’26, Devin Burger ’26, Liam Halstead ’25, Sam Peterson ’26. Matthew Gutow ’25.

Despite the best efforts of the student-athlete gridders, the Garnet Tide struggled for much of my time at the College. It didn’t help that the Clothier stands typically held only a few dozen diehards, most of them seemingly family members of the players, who sat in a sea of empty bleachers offering a cheer when Swarthmore managed a first down or a score.

It seemed as if the team, and the College, were perhaps too committed to the words of William Hyde Appleton, the late 19th-century Swarthmore president, who said, “In my long experience at Swarthmore, we have always played to win, but not for the winning.”

But what made for a discouraging athletic experience ultimately contributed to a rewarding educational one, at least for me. As a student sitting in that largely empty stadium on a beautiful fall afternoon, there was nothing — not my classmates and not the game — to distract me from my art history and political science reading. I was never more productive.

Some three decades later, I thought about those old football games when I stood in Clothier Field watching the men’s lacrosse team compete on a spring Saturday afternoon. Next door, the baseball team was playing a doubleheader in what, since it was redesigned in 2018 with the new PPR Apartments serving as the left field wall, is perhaps the coolest college ballpark in the country. And on the other side of the baseball field, Swarthmore’s softball team was engaged in a doubleheader of its own. Baseball and softball, both boasting winning records at the time, split their doubleheaders, while lacrosse, which was ranked as the No. 16 NCAA Division III team in the country that day, upset No. 9 Gettysburg.

The stands were packed, not only with athletes’ family members — some having come from brunch at the Broad Table Tavern or from tailgates in the parking lot — but with Swarthmore students, who greatly outnumbered the parents. They loudly cheered on the home teams, taking breaks only to snap selfies with Swarthmore’s Phineas the Phoenix mascot and to slurp water ice, courtesy of the Athletics Department as a part of Division III Week.

It was a raucous, carnivalesque scene.

I didn’t spot one person studying.

Whether it was the winning teams that drew the hordes of fans or the hordes of fans who inspired the winning teams is hard to say. But there is one thing that’s not in dispute: Swarthmore has become very good at sports.

More recently, this past fall, the field hockey and women’s soccer teams made now-perennial conference playoff appearances, men’s soccer spent much of the season ranked in the national top 25, and the volleyball team finished as runner-up in the Centennial Conference.

When the National Association of College Directors of Athletics released its final standings for the 2023-24 Division III college sports season, Swarthmore ranked 72 out of more than 400 Division III schools; the season before that Swarthmore ranked 29.

In fact, since the 2015-16 academic year, Swarthmore teams have won 19 Centennial Conference Championships and reached at least the final eight in their national tournaments five times (twice for men’s basketball, once each for women’s soccer, volleyball, and baseball), and two students have won national championships in track and field — Adria Retter ’23 (discus) and Katie Jo McMenamin ’16 (1500m).

If a visitor from the future had come to me three decades ago as I sat studying at Clothier Field to tell me about the state of the world today, I would have been in for plenty of surprises, from private space travel to pig-to-human-heart transplants. But nothing would have shocked me more than the news that, in 2025, Swarthmore College would be an athletic standout.

It was Landry Kosmalski’s third season as Swarthmore’s basketball coach. He’d been hired, on the heels of a 3-22 Garnet season, with high hopes. As a player and then an assistant coach at Davidson College, he’d enjoyed tremendous success at the Division I level; he saw no reason Swarthmore couldn’t enjoy tremendous success in Division III, especially when its academic peers, Amherst and Williams, regularly made (and occasionally won) the NCAA tournament.

But progress was slow. Swarthmore won only seven games in Kosmalski’s first season and just eight in his second; it carried a losing record into its 2015 game against Hopkins, the top team in the Centennial Conference and one of the best in all of Division III. But on that afternoon, things finally seemed to click for Kosmalski’s squad. At one point, Swarthmore rattled off 14 straight points and led by 17 at the half.

Then, with Swarthmore up by 15 points with less than six minutes to go and on the verge of a monumental upset, Hopkins went on an epic run, ultimately scoring the winning three-pointer in the game’s final minute to beat Swarthmore 56-55. At the time, it felt like a crushing defeat, but Kosmalski now views the game as a turning point.

In Kosmalski’s fourth season, Swarthmore finished 22-8 and was the runner-up in the Centennial Conference; the next season it was conference champion and received its first ever NCAA tournament bid. Since then, Swarthmore has been invited to the NCAA tournament every year and has twice made it to the Final Four. As The New York Times wrote of Swarthmore basketball in 2020, when it was the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament (before it was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic): Its “ascendance has been both methodical and out of nowhere.”

Men’s basketball has been far from the only program to be experiencing a renaissance.

“To see what Landry has done is inspiring,” says volleyball coach Harleigh Chwastyk. “Winning does help. It’s fun to be around.”

A major factor contributing to Swarthmore’s improved athletics profile has been the evolution of the College’s physical education department.

When Chwastyk was hired in 2002, she was just 24 and had served as an assistant volleyball coach at Smith College while getting her master’s degree in exercise and sports studies. Swarthmore, meanwhile, had recently canceled football (along with wrestling and, initially, badminton) and was overhauling the Athletics Department. The only full-time coaches at the time were five tenured physical education faculty members, who coached men’s and women’s basketball, swimming, tennis, and women’s lacrosse; the College’s 17 other varsity teams were coached by part-timers. But the College was in the process of hiring non-tenured, full-time coaches for its varsity teams and ensuring that those coaches, who would have faculty status, would only coach one sport.

The evolution has continued in recent years, with Swarthmore now in the middle of a five-year plan to hire a full-time assistant coach for every varsity team.

“The job description for a head coach is vastly different now than it was over a decade ago,” Koch says. “With significant changes in the workload for head coaches, the need for full-time assistant coaches is paramount to provide a quality experience for student-athletes.”

“Bringing Sam in was an injection of fresh thoughts and new ideas and expanding the bandwidth of the program,” Colby says, adding that Davy has been especially helpful when it comes to recruiting. “He’s been able to parse through recruits in ways that are strategic and purposeful. Our recruiting success began when Sam arrived.”

Of course, the immediate reason for Swarthmore’s athletic success is the student-athletes themselves. Swarthmore has always recruited high school students to play sports at the College, but that process has gradually become more intense.

“The hardest part is getting into Swarthmore,” Chwastyk says. “The second hardest thing is getting into the NCAA tournament.”

Some student-athletes who choose to attend Swarthmore would never have even considered the College were it not for sports.

Other student-athletes were already aware, as high schoolers, of Swarthmore’s academic virtues — and it was the opportunity to play sports there that made the College that much more attractive to them.

“I knew I wanted to pursue engineering, and Swarthmore was one of the few schools that actually has an engineering program that’s part of a liberal arts college,” says Genny Pezzola ’12, whose record-setting performance as a volleyball player led to her induction in the Garnet Athletics Hall of Fame this year.

“I saw it was more than just a team, it was a family,” she says. “This group took volleyball seriously, and that’s really all I wanted, because I was super passionate about volleyball.”

Whatever influences a student-athlete’s decision to come to Swarthmore, they tend to make the most of the opportunity, both on the field (or in the pool) and in the classroom.

“Varsity student-athletes here at Swarthmore represent close to 30% of the total student body,” Koch says. “They are integrated on campus and treated like other members of the general student body, keeping them focused on being a student first.”

“All Swarthmore students are hardworking and very intelligent,” says Hannah Kloetzer ’21, a former Swarthmore swimmer now studying for her Ph.D. in sports management at the University of Florida. “But being an athlete at Swarthmore and managing those time demands while also taking care of yourself means you have to have a great work ethic and attitude.

The challenge now for Swarthmore is to ensure that the College’s athletics facilities are worthy of its student-athletes and coaches. The ambitious plan to improve the College’s athletics infrastructure includes renovating the Cunningham Complex — which accommodates recreational sports and intercollegiate athletics and is where the lacrosse, field hockey, soccer, and tennis teams practice — and replacing the nearly century-old Lamb-Miller Field House with a new facility that will be twice the size and feature not only an indoor track, but also a recreation infield, coaches’ offices, locker rooms and a new strength and conditioning center.

“The project will be designed to attract users of all identities and abilities,” Koch says, “including community members who perhaps never considered — or even actively avoided — athletics-focused facilities.”

But even for those community members who wind up never using the new athletic facilities themselves, Swarthmore’s athletic success can provide benefits. As the students enjoying the lacrosse, baseball, and softball games on that beautiful spring day last year can attest, it is a lot of fun to root for your classmates when they compete and excel. And for alumni who rarely set foot on campus and don’t personally know any of the student-athletes who wear Swarthmore uniforms today, there can still be a sense of connection, and satisfaction, to be found in a livestream or a box score that shows their old school coming out on top in an important game.

William Hyde Appleton was no doubt correct that there should be more to Swarthmore’s sports than just “the winning,” but winning certainly has its rewards.