By Mark Tarnacki
Photography by Andy Duback

Flashing a girl-next-door smile as expansive as her strong and lanky six-foot swimmer’s frame, Eileen Mullowney ’12 confides that she’s “always losing things,” perhaps referring to her funky yellow Crocs that swim team buddies snagged and colored red for a prank this year. Maybe she means the time she lost her balance right into a miniature-golf water hazard while on the tennis team trip to Hilton Head in March.

While Mullowney’s self-described “goofy” personality endears the popular two-sport star athlete and Burlington native to her coaches and many friends, her tendency to “lose things” ends when she hits the pool or courts. She is the holder of six Saint Michael’s individual swimming records as a first-year, and went undefeated at fourth singles during the fall portion of the tennis team’s split season. She is also a Green Mountain Scholar, and an honors-program business major maintaining about a 3.7 GPA.

Mullowney is literally the girl next door for her Saint Michael’s swim coach Jim Donoghue ’70, who started mentoring his eventual star when she was only five years old on a Burlington-area swim club team. Their family homes in Burlington are only about 100 yards apart and Donoghue was her social studies teacher at Burlington High School. Many of her meets and practices during precollege competitions were in the Ross Sports Center pool, so she feels completely at home there now.

“She has lots of talent, no question,” Donoghue said, “but she spread herself across a lot of things before coming here, never feeling the need to be Number One. But now that she’s focused on just academics, swimming and tennis, she’s saying, ‘Ohhhh, you think that’s good? Watch what I can do next – I’m going to be excellent!’ But it’s not in an arrogant way. She just goes out and does it.”

Donoghue said his top swimmer is very self-disciplined and self-motivated, even if she emits an unfocused vibe at times, and her sense of humor and easy manner relax teammates, which helps them do better. “She’s just a great teammate, and basically every time she gets in the pool, she breaks a pool record,” he said.

Both her swimming and tennis coaches are convinced Mullowney has just begun to tap her potential for the coming three years. “The fact that she’s very tall and has a powerful serve and really strong forehand are her biggest assets as a tennis player,” said women’s tennis coach Greg Cluff. “She’s an especially strong doubles player and excellent competitor.”

Mullowney said her personal first-year highlight as a Saint Michael’s athlete was the Purple Knights swim team’s third-place finish in the New England Intercollegiate Swimming and Diving Association (NEISDA) championships at UMass-Dartmouth this winter. Helping the team win that meet before she graduates is one of her top goals, along with personally qualifying for NEISDA nationals, ideally in multiple events. She just missed qualifying this year by a fraction of a second.

Although she excels in freestyle, Mullowney said she always is glad to swim whatever events help the team most. While swimmers typically excel in either sprints or distance events, Mullowney loves (and wins) in both. Her individual program records are in the 50-yard, 100-yard, 200-yard, 500-yard and 1,000-yard freestyle plus the 100-yard individual medley. She also swam the anchor leg of the program-record-setting 800-yard freestyle relay. She holds every program freestyle record except the 1,650-yard event.

She said hers is a “huge tennis family,” which sparked her general interest in sports early. “I played basketball, softball, rode horses and did ballet, which was a mistake since I’m the most uncoordinated person I know,” she said. But she liked swimming best right from her first race at age five for the Twin Oaks team and kept it up through high school, while also playing on the tennis team there.

Mullowney said Saint Michael’s just felt right the first time she visited, and it let her remain close to her family and pursue all the sports she loves, while also getting strong academics and good financial aid. As with her sports competition, the honors program challenges her to push her limits, which she welcomes. “It’s met and even exceeded my expectations in every way,” she said of her academic, athletic and social Saint Michael’s experiences.

Donoghue said in his 10 years leading the team, “she is by far the best swimmer this place has seen, and a nice kid on top of it. I don’t know of a record we’ve got she couldn’t break.”