Drury swimming & diving opens 2022-23 season Friday at Little Rock

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Drury head coach Brian Reynolds officially begins his 40^th season as the head coach of the Panthers swimming & diving program on Friday as he leads his teams in the 2022-23 season opener in Little Rock, Arkansas. The DU women’s team will take on NCAA-I opponent and host Little Rock and Division II opponent Henderson State, while the Drury men’s team faces Henderson State in dual competition.
 
Reynolds has guided the men’s team for the previous 39 seasons and has been the only women’s head coach in Drury’s history as that program will begin its 35^th year on Friday. His Hall of Fame tenure has included 20 men’s national championships and 13 women’s national titles.
 
The Drury men’s team returns 25 lettermen from a team that ended last season as the NCAA-II Runner-Up for the second year in a row. Dominik Karacic, the reigning national champion in the 100 Butterfly, is among the returners along with Nathan Bighetti, who won the 2021 national title in the 200 Backstroke.
 
While coach Reynolds says he likes the experience his roster features, it is the newcomers he is excited about seeing compete. “It’s always exciting to see the new freshmen come in because they always bring in a level of energy and we’re excited about what we’ve seen from a bunch of the new guys,” he said.
 
“At the same time, we do have some good experience. Andrew Rodriguez is taking a fifth year of eligibility and he is one of the top IM’ers in the country,” added Reynolds. “He can swim everything and his 200 Fly on the last day of the national meet was just amazing. Kham Glass is another fifth year senior and will add a lot of help in the sprint events. I still don’t think we’ve gotten everything out of him that we’ve seen, so we really hope that this could be a year where he really shines. But I like having these fifth-year guys because they could make a significant difference at the end of the year.”
 
The Drury women’s squad won the Great Lakes Valley Conference championship last season, marking the fifth time in six years they have taken the title. The Panthers bring back 19 returners, including last year’s GLVC Freshman of the Year, Rafaela Raurich. Raurich won three individual conference titles last year, was a runner-up twice and picked up a third-place finish. The Brazilian was also part of a league-championship relay team in addition to two runner-up finishes on relay squads.
 
“We have a few holes in our women’s line-up that will show up in some of our dual meets early in the season,” said Reynolds. “We’ll work on those problem areas, but, at the same time, we have had a lot of kids really step and show us during their training that they are way ahead of where they were last year. That’s exciting to see – that we have a number of women on the team that are going to be better than they were last year and could score more potentially at the end of the year.”
 
Following their opener on Friday, both Drury teams return to the pool for duals at Missouri State on Oct. 14.
  
 
 
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