National championship has Grossenbach making waves in USA Swimming
Halfway through the swim, Stevenson’s Aria Grossenbach was in it to win it.
The University of Louisville-bound incoming senior was 50 meters into her final heat of the 100 freestyle July 28 at the 2026 Toyota National Championships in Irvine, California.
As she said Tuesday, still in Irvine, from the moment she dove into the pool she held nothing back.
“I got to the 50 and I flipped and I realized that I was with the leaders in my heat,” said Grossenbach, representing the Patriot Aquatic Club that operates out of Stevenson.
“I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I really have a shot at this.’ I was just kind of pushing, trying to stay up with the people in my heat, and I was able to tie for first,” she said.
Matching California’s Gabi Brito at a personal-best 54.85 seconds, both girls qualified for the Junior Pan Pacific Championships in Vancouver, British Columbia, Aug. 17-20.
“It was really awesome,” Grossenbach said. “I was kind of in disbelief for awhile.”
Unable to make it out of preliminaries in the 2025 National Championships in Indianapolis, the Pan Pacific will be Grossenbach’s first international competition representing Team USA.
Just this June, however, she swam in the same University of British Columbia pool during the Mel Zajac Jr. International Swim Meet.
She believes that experience might help.
“I think it does at least mentally a little bit for me, because I’ll have a little bit of familiarity with the area and with the pool,” Grossenbach said.
Not only did Grossenbach’s time in California get her onto the Pan Pacific roster, it also broke Illinois’ 100-meter freestyle record for girls 17-18. (She’s 17.)
Grossenbach also is now ranked 33rd all-time in her age group for USA Swimming.
Starting at 6 with the Lincolnshire Windjammers and then also with the Patriot Aquatic Club at 9, at the 2025 Illinois High School Association girls state finals Grossenbach won both the 50- and 100-yard freestyle. She swam on a second-place 200 freestyle relay and a 400 freestyle relay that finished third.
Increasing her overall IHSA medal count to 12, Grossenbach helped the Patriots girls program win its first team title.
“It was just so nice, like all of our hard work paid off,” she said.
A student board member with Illinois Swimming since 2024, Grossenbach will represent Team Illinois at the 2026 USA Swimming annual summit in Denver in September. She also coaches young Windjammers during the summer.
When she’s not training 25 hours a week, she likes to sew, and sometimes she makes her own clothes.
A prospective bioengineering student at Louisville, Grossenbach will swim in several events at the Junior Pan Pacific Championships — the 50 freestyle and the 50 and 100 butterfly events, plus her marquee 100 freestyle.
“I’m going to try to, of course, swim as fast as I can. But I’m also going to really try to use this for experience,” she said.
“I want to qualify for other international meets in the future, so just getting to know what it feels like to be a part of Team USA and just be swimming with the fastest people from our country, and then against really fast swimmers from other countries as well.
“It’s going to be really cool, and I just want to soak it all in.”
Back in Badger red
The University of Wisconsin’s annual women’s volleyball alumni match, Saturday at the school field house in Madison, features 11 current professional players, two Olympians, four national champions, two American Volleyball Coaches Association players of the year, and 27 AVCA All-America honorees.
The alumni play the current Badgers, who include 6-foot-5 freshman middle blocker Lynney Tarnow from Benet Academy.
The alumni include West Aurora graduate Lauren Carlini at setter, who earned several of those honors. The 2016-17 Sullivan Award winner earned 2024 Olympic silver and was a three-time first-team All-American between 2013-16. She’s now an assistant coach at Wisconsin and also plays on League One Volleyball’s (LOVB) Madison franchise.
Tiffany Clark, also out of Benet, will play libero. She was an honorable-mention All-American for Wisconsin in 2018.
Joining the alumni roster is one of Clark’s Badgers teammates, Grace Loberg, an outside hitter from Geneva. Loberg earned AVCA honorable mention honors in 2019 and 2020. She is with the San Diego Mojo of Major League Volleyball, named a player of the week in May.
doberhelman@dailyherald.com