“Just the chance to go to an Ivy League school and still swim made me choose Harvard,” she said.

“I basically decided that I would go to the best academic school I could,” said Emily Wilson, adding that “there were a lot factors” that went into her decision and that the swim team “definitely had a weight in it.”

Pre-frosh recruitment visits to Cambridge also loomed large in the swimmers’ decisions to join Harvard.

Though she visited other universities, “I got a better feeling when I came here,” Blondin said. “I felt like I fit in more, like this was the place for me. It just felt right.”

Wilson said she felt she would fit in better at Harvard than at the two other schools she visited, adding that “I didn’t really like my Yale recruiting trip that much.”

This past year’s successful recruiting campaign bodes well for the future of the women’s swim program.

“The environment gets better every year,” said junior swimmer Emily Stapleton, who was on the team when it finished second last year and third the year before in the Ivy League standings.

Even Morawski conceded that she is optimistic about the upcoming season, noting that the freshmen look to be able replacements for the eight seniors who graduated last year.

But it is the freshmen who seem to be most enthusiastic.

“We should be awesome,” Wilson said. “We have a lot of strong freshmen, and that definitely adds to the team. We’re looking at an Ivy Championship.”