Regan Nolan will begin her fourth season with Catawba Swimming in the fall of 2025, her first as Associate Head Swimming Coach.
Nolan once again helped establish Catawba Swimming as one of the fastest rising programs in the South Atlantic Conference, Southeast Region and beyond in 2024-25, as the Catawba Indians set program records with their 14th- and 16th-place finishes at the NCAA Division II Championships for the women and men, respectively.
Both Catawba teams finished second at the SAC Championships, marking the first time both finished as the runners-up at the league meet, as Matthew Gearing earned SAC Women’s Coach of the Year.
Catawba earned a program-record 34 All-America honors at the NCAA Championships along with 14 SAC Championships. Sophomore Maks Minichowski was a four-time SAC champion and earned four First Team All-America honors, one of just three men to accomplish the feat at the NCAA meet.
Catawba’s women once again led the country in GPA with a 3.89 in the fall and a 3.87 in the spring, good for their fifth and sixth straight semesters pacing the nation in the classroom, respectively.
Nolan helped led the swim programs to new heights in the 2023-24 season, as both teams posted their highest finish at the SAC Championships in team history. The women reached 22 in the CSCAA poll, their first national ranking in program history and besting Division I Gardner-Webb in a dual meet. Not to be outdone by their successes in the pool. the women also earned the highest team GPA in the country for the third and fourth semesters in a row, while both teams recorded the most volunteer hours in the country. Marit Reckmann earned SAC Scholar-Athlete of the Year and Lillie Martin was the SAC Elite 23 Award winner in women's swimming.
The men finished as the SAC runners-up, helping Matthew Gearing earn SAC Male Swimming Coach of the Year, the first such honor of his career. The men earned the top GPA in Division II in the fall and third-best in the spring. Maks Minichowski earned Men's SAC Swimmer of the Year, while adding two All-American finishes at the NCAA Championships. Both teams upended nationally ranked Wingate in a dual meet, the first win over the Bulldogs for the women since 1999 and the first-ever win for the men over their conference foes.
In all, the teams combined to break 40 school records in 2023-24, with a total of 187 individual lifetime bests. The teams combined to take six SAC individual titles and send a program-record four swimmers to NCAA Nationals in Indianapolis.
In her first season as assistant coach, the Catawba men's and women's swim teams earned their highest conference meet finishes in program history and each were named Scholar All-America teams for the Fall and Spring.
Nolan, who swam at Catawba from 2017 to 2020, returned to Salisbury as assistant coach in October of 2022. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with her bachelor's degree in Business Administration. In her time as a student-athlete in the Catawba swimming program, Nolan was a two-time captain in 2019 and 2020, a two-time women's swim team MVP, and ranks top-10 all-time in the women's 500-meter freestyle, 1000-meter freestyle, and the 1650-meter freestyle.
