ASU Triathlon: Sun Devils win third straight national championship; Henry goes back-to-back

(Photo: Nicholas Badders/WCSN)

The Arizona State women’s triathlon team continued its domination of the collegiate ranks Sunday afternoon in Tempe as the Sun Devils won their third consecutive national championship. After Sun Devils swept the podium positions in 2017, the team managed to one-up itself in 2018 as Cliff English’s squad took each of the first five spots along with all seven competitors placing in the top 10.

“I thought they were going to be strong,” English said. “I thought we really had a good chance again at doing the podium sweep … but they surprised me. They surpassed that and went for it. It was pretty incredible.”

“Just shows how strong ASU is,” sophomore Hannah Henry said. “We have a great team of girls… awesome coaches, and the whole team is just so strong.”

Henry, the individual national champion for the second year in a row and native of British Columbia, Canada, finished with a time of 1:01:58. Her national championship winning time in 2017 was 1:03:34.

Right on her heels was junior Charlotte Ahrens, with redshirt senior Katie Gorczyca, sophomore Kyla Roy and freshman Audrey Ernst rounding out the top five for Arizona State. With the Sun Devils taking home the team title, South Dakota and East Tennessee State finished in second and third, respectively.

“Last year we knew we were strong, this year we knew we were even stronger,” Ahrens said.

With competitors beginning the race with a 750-meter swim through Tempe Town Lake, the Sun Devils fell behind South Dakota’s Leah Drengenberg early on. After the swim, Drengenberg held the race lead, but three Sun Devils trailed her.

“It was one of the hardest swims I’ve done,” Henry said. “The swim, I found, was a really fast pace and I felt like I was losing the feet in front of me at times so I was working really hard just to stay with them.”

During the bike portion of the race, the Sun Devils were able to separate themselves from the rest of the competitors, with Ahrens, Roy, Gorczyca and Henry holding the first four spots in the race, followed by Drengenberg.

“On the bike it was nice because I had three of my teammates in a pack with me,” Henry said. “We were working all together and increasing the gap from the next girls.”

When all was said and done, each of the Sun Devils competitors placed in the top 10 a year after no Sun Devil finished worse than 21^st at the 2017 national championship.

2018 is the first year which saw the competition form a Division I-Division II wave, as well as expand to 26 teams — up from last year’s 18. Still, despite that growth, English and Arizona State athletic director Ray Anderson both expressed their desire to bring more Division I programs into the fold and make the sport NCAA certified. Anderson said he has taken phone calls from other Power-5 institutions regarding the logistics and financial outlook of adding a triathlon program.

“I know there are some [Power-5 institutions] looking at it very carefully,” Anderson said. “I don’t want to call them out publicly, but I’m going to keep encouraging them when I get to the NCAA convention and I see the athletic directors because they do ask about it. We’ll be very assertive and helpful in advocating for additional teams.”

Still, with the Sun Devils having won three national championships in the sports first three years at the collegiate level, English said the program has room for growth.

“Some of the girls come to this program because they want to be the best,” English said. “I think the environment we’ve created, a lot of them want to go on to the Olympic games … It keeps us hungry because we know while we want to be the best at the collegiate circuit, we’re all still trying to strive to be the best on the world level as well.”

“You can always keep looking to be better.”

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