The Howard University men’s swimming and diving team won the Northeast Conference championship Sunday, marking the team’s first conference title in 34 years.
Over the past nine years, Howard’s swim and tennis coach Nicholas Askew has completely transformed the swimming program — and it’s personal for him. Askew was a swimmer and tennis player at Howard (class of 2000) who by 2013 was actually advocating for the university to shut down the swimming program due to underinvestment.
“It was a disservice to the student athletes that came here with hopes and ambitions of developing and getting better and not having a consistent coach,” Askew told WBUR’s Here & Now. “My answer to the equation was just cut it. Stop having a program that’s not being supported.”
But after taking the coaching position in 2014, Askew elevated the profile of the nation’s only all-Black college swim team — and the only historically Black university left with a swim program. His team competes with a DJ blasting music and the Bisonette dance team performing routines poolside, as Sports Illustrated detailed in a cover story earlier this month.
“Nobody in America can offer what we have in our pool,” Askew said in the Sports Illustrated piece, which pointed out that about one-third of the Black collegiate swimmers in America are on the Howard swim team. “Where else are you going to see this?”
That question was answered, in part, at the NEC Conference Championship, which took place from Feb. 21-25 in Ohio, where Howard’s men’s team won by a margin of 169 points over Long Island University. (The women’s team came in fourth, finishing 22.5 points behind the LIU women’s team.) The men broke 16 records, and the women broke 15, according to WUSA9. The answer, it seems, is that there is no other program like theirs in the country.
The team also walked away with multiple individual trophies: Senior Miles Simon won the NEC Outstanding Swimmer award; sophomore Jordan Walker won the NEC Outstanding Diver award; and Zuzu Nwaeze, of Columbia, Maryland, won Rookie of the Meet honors. The team also won NEC Coaching Staff of the Year honors.
The swimmers and divers aren’t the only athletes on Howard’s campus making history. With just a few games left in the season, the first-place men’s basketball team is set to compete for a Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference title for the first time in over 30 years. The Steph Curry-backed golf team has also had an incredible trajectory after launching in 2021, most recently winning the PGA Works and MEAC championships.
Next up for Bison swimming, members of team leave for the CSCAA National Invitational Championships, to be held March 9-11.
