By Hannah Bartlebaugh, Staff Writer
Tess Boyer continues to etch her name in the history books. The junior biochemistry major and Wheaton College swimmer set both individual and team records last year. Since starting at Wheaton at age 16, she has continued to lap the competition in her various swimming events this winter.
“In the conference, she really is quite a standout,” said head women’s swimming coach Meghan Ayers. While the coach says it’s common to have national-level athletes who are strong in a particular swimming stroke, an athlete like Boyer, who competes well in every style, is unique.
Despite starting college at a younger age, Boyer does not feel that she faced more challenges than her older peers. “There would’ve been challenges no matter what, and these are just the challenges that I have specifically,” she said. “It’s been really great, and I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any other way.”
Boyer said she was not particularly drawn to swimming when she was little. “My mom put me in every sport there was, but it was just funny because I was not a child who loved the water at all.”
She even said that the first time she went underwater at eight years old, she hated it. However, when her mom put her in a summer swim team, she learned she had a knack for it, and later began swimming competitively.
When it came time to decide if she would continue swimming in college, Boyer was not making that her top priority. “I was really looking for a school that I liked for the school, not just somewhere to swim,” she said.
Wheaton checked all of the boxes that she was looking for, and they also had a swim team. Boyer appreciated the team’s culture, which was different from competitive club team environments she’d been part of in the past. “I think this is where God wanted me to be, and it’s providential that there’s also such a good swimming environment,” she said.
Boyer’s freshman season had a successful start, but was impeded by a wrist injury that occurred right before the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin (CCIW) Swimming and Diving Championships. Like her teammates, she was planning to train lighter in the weeks leading up to the meet, in hopes of increasing her swimming speed so that she could qualify for the NCAA Championships. She still competed at the conference championships, where she won the 200-meter butterfly and the 400-meter individual medley events. However, the injury prevented her from reaching an NCAA qualifying time.
Despite this disappointment, Boyer said that her injury was a very important experience for her. “That forced me to reset my priorities and not focus so much on myself,” she said. Instead of fixating on personal times, she turned her focus to the team.
After recovering, Boyer went on to have a record-breaking sophomore season. She earned the CCIW Women’s Swimmer of the Week Award four times and won seven CCIW titles. At the 2025 CCIW Championships, she finished with a time of 4:26.00 in the 400 individual medley (IM), qualifying her for the NCAA Division III National Championships.
At Nationals in March, she broke the Wheaton College and CCIW record for the 400 IM, with a time of 4:24.95. She called the experience “surreal.”
“I was just so thrilled,” she said. “I felt very satisfied that I had done what I had set out to do from the beginning of the season.”
Madison Emmitt, a Chinese language and culture and chemistry double major, is one of Boyer’s teammates. She said that Boyer’s success has been good for team morale. “It was really exciting for the team to send somebody to nationals and then for her to do so well!”
At the Wheaton Invitational meet on Dec. 5–6, 2025, Boyer was back to raking in the records. She had previously stated her desire to break the 200 IM team record. On Dec. 5, she not only broke the team record for the event, but also broke the pool record, meaning she recorded the fastest-ever event time in the Lederhouse Natatorium, Wheaton’s pool, and did the same for the meet record. These records were set in 2016 and 2017, by former Wheaton swimmers Kristen Nitz ‘16 and Erin Bagley ‘17, respectively.
Boyer initially broke the record in the preliminary session with a time of 2:03.83. Later that day, in the finals, she cut down her time to 2:03.72 to break the record once more. On the second day of the meet, she also broke both the team record and meet record in the 400 individual medley with a time of 4:23.23. Boyer met the NCAA Division III B-cut in both individual medley events, making her eligible for consideration for an invitation to the 2026 NCAA Championships. Both of her times were faster than the previous year’s invited marks.
Meghan Ayers said that she wants Boyer to continue loving the process of swimming beyond just breaking records. “Our motto is free to swim,” she said. “We can glorify God through the swimming, but also be free to enjoy the process.”
