As the spring semester progresses, graduation is getting closer.. The impact graduating classes leave on the campus is always noticeable, from what they have given to the community to what the community will miss once they leave.
Athletics is no exception, and the Elizabethtown College swim team will greatly feel the loss of several team leaders. Out of the 33 Blue Jays from both the men’s and women’s teams, 13 swimmers will be graduating this semester.
One senior from the swim team, Andrew Hoch, had the time to talk briefly about his time on the swim team and the community fostered around it.
Hoch is a senior chemistry major who’s been on the swim team during all four years of his undergraduate career at Etown.. Aside from his studies and athletics, he also assists Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Desmond Yengi with his research.
Hoch’s time spent in the water started well before arriving on campus. He started swimming at eight years old, mostly to burn off some excess energy he had back when he was a kid. The community around the sport, the friends he made along the way and his enjoyment of the competitive nature of the race encouraged him to keep pursuing this hobby.
Hoch would find a similar community in the Etown swim team. Over the years, the team would compete in more than a dozen regular season meets and conference championships..
Besides their time in the water, Hoch enjoyed how the swim team exemplified Etown’s “Educate for Service” motto.
“We help out with the volleyball court setups and we host the Special Olympics meet on-campus around early to late March,” Hoch said. “We also do stuff at our championship meet, which is actually coming up pretty soon, where we have a bunch of our students help organize practices.”
One of the most notable things Hoch has contributed to the swim team is one of their most recent traditions. A month before the Landmark Conference Championships, during his first year at Etown, the swim teams were helping each other practice by competing against each other. As Hoch’s team was doing well during this meet, he grabbed a broom and pretended to “sweep the competition.”
“I didn’t realize I was going to start a tradition on the team, but accidentally started a tradition on the team…Me and [fellow swimmer] Liam [Quick] decided it’d be a great idea to bring the broom to meets because it’d be a fun little prop,” Hoch said. “Now we use it as a way to mark success.If you win your heat, you sign the broom. If you break a record, you sign the broom. It didn’t matter if you were the top dog in your event or if it was in an event you don’t normally swim, it gave kind of a purpose of wanting to go fast at a meet.”
Of course, this is just one of the ways that the graduating class of 2025 has left an indelible yet positive mark on the Etown College campus. Thanks to the community fostered by people like Hoch, future members of the Blue Jay swim team should have no problem leaving their opponents eating the dust kicked up by a specific broom.
“We’re a very family-orientated team,” Hoch said.
Hoch and the rest of the swim team can be found at the four-day long Landmark Conference Championship in Baltimore, Md., starting Feb. 13th.
