What got you first interested in the sport?
Acompora: I started when I was seven years old because my cousins were actually on the swim team and I wanted to hang out with them more. So, I started swimming and then I stuck with it through middle school and high school, and I swim now still.
Weiser: I started at a young age, too, and we used to do a summer club team and it was all about fun and it made me like the sport more, so I stuck with it throughout middle school and high school, and now I’m here.
When did you decide you wanted to pursue it at a collegiate level?
Acompora: I started peaking in my junior and senior year of high school. I started going really fast and qualifying for faster meets. So, my coaches were like ‘You could go somewhere with this,’ so then I started looking into schools and Fairfield really appealed to me, both for the athletic and academic aspects. So that’s when I decided to continue my career in the sport.
Weiser: In high school, I got really serious with swimming and I wanted to see how far I could take it. So, I was excited at the idea that I’d be able to continue swimming and getting better and also contributing to a collegiate team. It sounded pretty cool.
What is your best swim moment in life?
Acompora: Mine would be my sophomore year of college. I was swimming at the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Championships and it was the 500-meter freestyle that I really hadn’t been training for, and I dropped a significant amount of time and tied one of the girls that was older than me. She was always so much faster than me and I got to keep up with her which is really cool. I ended up getting the best time and surprising my coaches and teammates.
Weiser: Mine was my freshman year here at our MAAC Championship. I was swimming the 100-meter freestyle which is my event, and I hadn’t dropped time in a while. I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue swimming at that point, so I won the best time in the event and it was really emotional for me and everyone on my team was super supportive. It kind of made me want to stick it out, so that was probably a pivotal moment in my career.
How do you get along with the teammates?
Acompora: We’re pretty much a family. We’re practicing two times a day almost every day and see each other a lot. We rely on each other and a lot of us live with each other, so it’s a pretty close team.
Weiser: Oh yeah, I’d say we get along great for the most part.
Do you have a favorite professional sport/team to watch and why?
Acompora: I’m biased to swimming, obviously. I’ve followed it my entire life since I was little and some people that are swimming in the sport, I’ve been watching them since I was younger, like Natalie Coughlin, or up and coming people like Ryan Lochte and Missy Franklin. It’s interesting to see how fast they are. I aspire to work as hard as them in the pool.
Weiser: I guess I follow professional swimming too. But I’m from Philly so I like the Phillies and I like watching baseball so yeah, that’s about it.
Explain how your races usually go.
Weiser: Well I’m a sprinter so I swim the 50 free, 100 free, short events and for shorter events, it’s really all about not messing up and it’s just everything you’ve got. So you dive off the blocks,you have to have perfect starts, perfect walls because somebody could touch you out by .2 seconds and you could lose the race. It’s really all about perfect technique and getting up and racing.
Acompora: As opposed to Meghan, I swim like the mile and the thousands which are about 66 and 40 miles respectively which are really all about pace. So it’s more about endurance type of race and again you’re going off the blocks, you’re swimming 66 laps as opposed to two, it’s more about keeping a consistent time throughout. It’s not about perfect technique more as it is about your own strength and strategy whereas [Weiser’s] is more about racing.
What are your expectations for this season?
Weiser: I think we’re doing awesome. We have a new coach this year and she’s totally about turning the program around. I mean it’s only been about three months, not even, and we have seen program records broken, pool records broken, and, I mean, everyone’s been racing very well. So I think that we have the potential to step up from where we were in previous years and I think that Janelle Atkinson-Wignall is going to take it even further.
Acompora: Janelle is an awesome addition to the program this year and I think that people are going to be surprised by us especially when we go to MAACs. We’ve ranked seventh which we got last year in the MAAC but I have a feeling that we are going to rank a lot higher this year based on our performances. Everyone has hit personal bests and she’s taking the program really far and working us really hard but we’ve all accepted the challenge so I think we are going to really far and we are going to surprise a lot of people in championships.
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