Sidney Campbell knew this day would come. The day when she would put on her racing suit, cap, and goggles for the last time in a competitive swim meet. For Campbell that last race will come at the 2025 NAIA National Championship held March 5-8 in Elkhart.
The National Championships close out an award-winning four-year college swimming career for the 2021 North Montgomery High School graduate. When Campbell enrolled at Indiana Wesleyan University in the fall of 2021, it was with a long history of high school swimming awards, but with college swimming, she knew she was facing a much tougher challenge.
“The transition from high school to collegiate athletics was much more difficult than I was anticipating, although it was an extremely rewarding process,” Campbell said. “The responsibility of managing my own time, classes, proper nutrition, and practice suddenly fell completely on me and there was definitely a learning curve. Not to mention that since I am competing at a higher level of athletics I am expected to practice at a higher level, and so adjusting to the rigorous practice schedule was a difficult challenge as well.”
Campbell got a taste of success her freshman year, being named a Collegiate All-American for the first time, but she knew it was only going to get tougher. Campbell, a nursing major, knew her classes at IWU were going to get more intense and require more time in her already packed schedule, if she wanted to keep her grades where she wanted them to be. Campbell was the 2020 Lilly Endowment Scholarship winner for Montgomery County, which comes with certain academic standards that had to be maintained.
“Being an athlete and a nursing major certainly presents with challenges because my training and course loads were very demanding,” she said. “However, I have known for a long time that I wanted to be a nurse and I knew going in that it would take a lot of determination. Thankfully I have a wonderful support system on the team and with my parents (Jon and Martha Campbell) and friends and family. They helped me keep striving to perform well in my classes and in the pool.”
For Campbell, her swimming career goes all the way back to when she was 7 years old and first started participating in the summer swim program at North Montgomery High School. North Montgomery head swim coach Erin Yeager ran the eight-week summer program and would eventually coach Campbell in middle school and high school swimming.
“Coach Yeager was absolutely the foundation for my swimming career and helped me to not only develop as a successful athlete from a technique perspective, but she taught me how to love to compete. Coach Yeager has always been a competitor herself and she showed me how to love the sport I was doing and be successful at it.”
Once she started to see some real success in middle school swimming (Campbell still holds several middle school records at North Montgomery and pool records at Crawfordsville High School), she knew it was time to consider club swimming with the Sugar Creek Swim Club and Coach Kevin Hedrick.
“I remember being scared to join SCSC because I knew that most of those kids swam year-round and had probably more total pool time than me because of that,” Campbell said. “However, Coach Hedrick was so excited when I met with him to join the club and he really invested into my swimming career. He knows how to coach elite athletes so I was excited to train under him and improve my times even more.”
Her high school swim career resulted in multiple trips to the IHSAA State Finals, and her name still sits in several spots on the North Montgomery High School swimming record board. She used to have a few more relay records, but those have recently been broken by the current batch of NMHS swimmers.
“Everyone knows that records are meant to be broken, so it makes me so proud to see that our swim program continues to improve and get better, and broken records are evidence of that. Especially since I swam SCSC with lots of those girls whose names are now on the board, I couldn’t be happier to know that Coach Yeager is continuing to coach a successful program and that those girls are continuing to get faster too.”
One thing that Campbell was recently able to accomplish was getting her name on the record board at IWU. The Mid-South Conference Championships in February resulted in not only a new IWU school record for Campbell, but the senior team captain also set two lifetime bests at the meet, locked down her invite to the 2025 National Championships, and saw the IWU Woman’s Swim Team exceed expectations going into the meet and qualify several swimmers for Nationals. The National meet will be the end of an outstanding college career, as Campbell begins her next phase of life. She will graduate magna cum laude from Indiana Wesleyan in the spring with her nursing degree and will marry long-time boyfriend Garrett Stevens in the summer.
“At the end of the day, what matters most to me is that I glorify Jesus in everything that I do,” she said. “He has given me the ability to swim, the opportunity to study nursing at such an outstanding school, and the incredible family, friends, and coaches that have all impacted my life up to this point.”
Regardless of her upcoming performance at the 2025 National Championships, Campbell’s outstanding swim career finishes strong and reflects years of hard work and dedication. While this will be her last college swim meet, she does plan to continue to compete by participating in triathlons and other physical challenges. No doubt she will face those challenges with the same determination and success she did throughout her swimming career.
