by Payton Miller — After only one year at Morningside University Trey Kennedy has taken the school record in the 1650 Freestyle, but how did Kennedy get to where he’s at today?
Kennedy has been swimming competitively for nearly twelve years, and it all started at a swim club in Colorado Springs. At the age of six Kennedy became a member of his mother’s club team, CSST (Colorado Springs Swim Team), and has been hooked on the sport ever since.
Kennedy continued through high school representing Rampart High. It wasn’t until his senior year that his success in the pool was put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Like so many other seniors his season ended abruptly and his future in the sport seemed to be at an end. From that point, Kennedy put his swimming on hold to attend Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado.
“It was at that point that I was recruited by Morningside’s assistant swim coach James Svoboda. I got back into the water and started putting in the work,” he said. Kennedy began his second year at Morningside as a distance swimmer.
The Morningside swim team puts in countless hours of work in a season that spans across much of the school year. From August to February the swimmers are hard at work.
“Training has been hard. I’ve definitely been training a lot more than I ever had before, but I’ve also gotten progressively faster throughout the season,” Kennedy said.
In a show of his hard work, on December 5 at the Morningside Invitational, Kennedy took the school record for the 1650 freestyle with a time of 17:27.86. He surpassed Ron Defauw’s record of 17:36.07 which was set in 2019.
Kennedy said, “It was definitely a confidence boost. I wanted my name of that board, and that record makes me feel confident about my performance at conference coming up in the next few weeks.”
The Mustang swim team is gearing up for their final meet of the season. Conference Championships will take place the first weekend of February in Fremont, Neb.
When asked about how he thinks the team will do, Kennedy said, “We worked our butts off. We’re just going to go out there and do what we’ve been training all these months to do.”
Leave a Reply