Lobos Host NMSU on Senior Day

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It’s taken a long time to get here for UNM’s seven seniors.  Not just for this season leading up to Senior Day, but throughout a career path that started for at least one Lobo with the 2020-21 COVID shutdown.  What the seven seniors have done, Layni Andrle, Jordan Foster, Linda Franco, Asiana Lee, Paige Lyons, Katy McCarter and Bryann Quintana, is allowed UNM’s swimming and diving team to build back UNM’s program.  They have done it weathering storms, and have turned those storms, with the help of second-year coaches Naya Higashijima, Phoebe Campbell and Logan Andrews into a calm, cloudless sky.

And it shows.  The Lobos for the first time in seemingly years have been rewriting the Lobos’ Top-10 performers list, doing so in no less than in 10 catagories.  Seemingly each week the Lobo single-season best times list needs rewritten, and in UNM’s last meet at Northern Arizona, the Lobos turned in 35 single-season bests.  It shows that as the long season has worn on, the Lobos trajectory continues to rise.

Now, the squad will say goodbye to seven seniors who in varying ways have turned into linchpins for the program moving forward, whether or not it’s the wisdom and experience of UNM’s resident “fifth-year freshman” in Jordan Foster or newer swimmers like Linda Franco, the Lobos have certainly benefitted in 2024-25 from the septets experience, wisdom and expertise.

All of that will come into play on Saturday as the squad has its final dual meet before heading to Houston, Texas for the Mountain West Championships February 19-22.