Underwater Kicking Champ and Big Personality Emma Sticklen Starting Strong in Fifth Year at Texas
Down the stretch in the arduous 200 butterfly, Emma Sticklen finds her groove. During those laps, when even top-notch competitors are fading and trying desperately to reach the wall, Sticklen can reach deep and produce magical finishes, just as she has done at consecutive NCAA Championships in 2023 and 2024.
The relentlessly positive University of Texas swimmer has embraced her longshot status when trailing in these finals, convincing herself that overcoming the deficits is feasible. But the primary force in her stunning comebacks, beating Alex Walsh one year and then passing three competitors at the end one year later, has been her underwater dolphin kicking. In the most recent NCAA win, Rachel Klinker emerged ahead off the final wall, only for Sticklen to kick underwater until 15 meters and burst ahead, with Klinker having already taken four strokes on the surface.
These moments were years in the making, going back to when Sticklen was 14 years old, a high school freshman swimming in her fifth championship meet in quick succession. Feeling fatigued entering the 100 backstroke at Texas Age Group State meet (TAGS), Sticklen decided, “I’m just gonna kick the whole way because I don’t want to swim.” Her win that day helped her realize just how much underwater kicking could propel her swimming career, figuratively and literally.
“That’s when me and my club coach started paying attention to, ‘Hey, this could be the strategy in everything that we do. We would record my kicks, and we would measure the velocity of them. I had the kick count down to a T. I already kind of had that strategy when I got to college. I was just able to get stronger and better at it,” Sticklen said. “Whenever I do kick sets now, I never use a kickboard. I am kicking on my back underwater, and I’m kicking as far as I can on every single wall.”
The championship meet comebacks have become a staple of Texas practices as well, leaving teammates occasionally annoyed when Sticklen blasts ahead on the last lap. Of course, they cannot be too upset, not with Sticklen becoming one of the Longhorns’ best swimmers during the team’s most successful stretch in almost three decades.
A Leading Longhorn
Unlike many of her competitors on the national team and even teammates at Texas, Sticklen did not begin her college career as a can’t-miss, blue-chip recruit, never qualifying for the U.S. national junior team. “I had won some state championships, so I was relevant in Texas, for sure, but not as much as I would have liked on the national level,” she said. “I thought I was capable, but I just didn’t know if I was crazy or not.”
Emma Sticklen celebrating an NCAA title — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
With the right college program, both for training and for fit, Sticklen believed she could excel. She proved it right away as a freshman at Texas during the 2020-21 season when extensive COVID-19 restrictions were in place. At her first NCAA Championships, Sticklen finished 11th in the 100 fly and seventh in the 200 fly. In the latter race, Sticklen was one of three Texas swimmers to qualify for the A final, and Longhorns finished the meet third, the team’s highest finish during head coach Carol Capitani’s tenure.
Every year since, Sticklen and her team have matched or improved those results. She has been in the 100 fly A final at NCAAs the last three years, joining the sub-50-second club and topping out at second place in 2024. That final has become Texas’ property, Sticklen joined by Kelly Pash each of the last four years plus Olivia Bray in 2021, 2022 and 2024 and graduate transfer Dakota Luther in 2023.
And after being shut out of the top two at NCAAs every year since 1994, Texas has placed second at each of the last three national meets. In 2024, the Longhorns scored 441 points, the highest total for a runner-up since 2015, becoming the first group to come within 100 points of the University of Virginia during the Cavaliers’ four-peat.
At these meets, the Texas women feed off their teammates’ personality and energy, donning bright-colored clothing and occupying the deck space immediately adjacent to the starting blocks, giving them the quickest possible route to embrace victorious mates. Sticklen describes the team as “just a big, loud presence,” and she is no exception, calling herself “super silly and weird” and the team’s weights coach referring to her as the “forever freshman.” She said, “I’ve kind of always had a light and fun energy I’ve tried to carry all throughout my swimming career.”
When Capitani and associate head coach Mitch Dalton deliver a message, Sticklen leads the buy-in process. The vibe of this year’s Texas team, Sticklen said, is “elite and excellence,” and she attributes that to standards the coaches began implementing from the start of practice. They have empowered the team to “choose positivity.” Training drives fast swimming, but Sticklen interprets the coaches’ intentional efforts to build team culture and closeness and show care about their swimmers as individuals as critical .
Sticklen sees the results of this program-building each day in practice and not based on the times produced in tough main sets.
“When I come to practice every day, everyone is out on deck doing their activation, stretch bands and warming up. And I swear we get to the pool earlier and earlier each time. As a fifth year and an older person, I just want to roll up to the pool and get in. But everyone is there ready to swim, and after they’ve done their activation, they’re just catching up with each other, sitting on the bleachers and talking. And I think that is a huge deal,” Sticklen said. “We take an extra hour out of our day to come to the pool and get ready to swim. And like, put our all into each practice, you know, and put time into each other. We do care a lot. And it almost becomes second nature.”
Fifth Year and Beyond
Coming back for a fifth year of college was never in question for Sticklen, whose class was the last to be allowed the bonus year because of COVID-19. “I didn’t think a second thought about not doing it,” she said, adding that she knew her decision as early as her freshman year. She is among five fifth-years on the roster, with Bray, Grace Cooper and Ava Longi returning while Abby Arens joins as a transfer from NC State.
Emma Sticklen at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
Sticklen is now 22, and she got engaged over the summer. For the first time, she is a member of the U.S. National Team, having finished among the top six swimmers in the country in the 200-meter fly. Given her strength underwater, her long-course success has not matched up to short-course achievements, but she did reach the finals in both butterfly events at U.S. Olympic Trials, a massive jump for a swimmer who competed at the Wave I Trials meet three summer earlier. In the 200 fly final, Sticklen actually led at the halfway point and remained in contention through 150 meters, but she faded down the stretch as Regan Smith and Alex Shackell secured Olympic spots.
She took a month-long break at the end of the summer, leaving her questioning whether she would be able to regain fitness in time for the start of the college season, but Sticklen is now pleased at the brief sabbatical. “I think the break was so needed because I came back and I was hungry,” she said. “I missed swimming, and I missed training so much that it kind of gave me the excitement and the motivation to get started again and just start off like guns-a-blazing.”
And in the first meet of the season at LSU, Sticklen put on a show, posting a lifetime-best mark of 1:49.77 to win the 200 fly. She improved upon her own status as history’s fourth-ranked performer in the event while also setting the country’s early-season top time in the 100 fly at 50.23. The resounding early times prompted Sticklen to joke to her coaches, “Oh, you guys are never gonna rest me now!”
The energy from the finality of this college season has given Sticklen a little extra excitement, although she did emphasize that she does not plan to be done with swimming following NCAAs in March. At least one long-course season remains before Sticklen, like so many college champions before her, faces a decision about her future.
Before that, the college season will see Texas hosting a pair of high-profile regular season meets, against Indiana in November and then welcoming Virginia, NC State and Arizona State in January. On both of those occasions, Texas will turn the meet into a full-scale, fan-friendly production, with light shows and potentially a visit from Longhorns mascot Bevo.
The Longhorns will race at the SEC Championships for the first time, a massive upgrade in competition from their former domination of the Big 12, and then will aim for another top finish at the NCAA Championships in Federal Way, Wash., where Sticklen will be considered the favorite for a third consecutive title in the 200 fly.
“I hope that I can be a lesson to people,” Sticklen said. “You don’t have to come into college being a superstar already. You can just make yourself into that, and you can work for it, but you can also do it by being a freaking weirdo, like goofball person and having fun with it.”