After Golden Summer, McKenzie Siroky Entering Fall With Opportunities to Continue Momentum
Perhaps no American woman put together a better summer season than McKenzie Siroky. The 21-year-old Division I ice hockey commit-turned-standout breaststroker qualified for her first World Championships team in 2025, then became America’s top sprint breaststroker in 2026. She put the world on notice with personal-best performances during the Mare Nostrum circuit, then picked up two wins at U.S. Nationals, including a 100-meter upset win over Kate Douglass.
At the Pan Pacific Championships, Siroky again topped the 100 breast, holding off China’s Tang Qianting for gold by 0.14. Siroky added a silver in the 50 breast, finishing only three hundredths behind Tang, and she provided a strong breaststroke performance as part of the U.S. women’s gold-medal-winning 400 medley relay. Siroky’s times held up as the second-fastest marks recorded in both the 50 and 100 between all of the summer’s major international competitions.
Not much time to rest on those accomplishments, though, as Siroky enters her junior season at the University of Tennessee and the Lady Vols prepare to take part in the College Swimming League’s debut season. Tennessee will host a CSL match October 9 against Louisville, Michigan and Virginia, and the team travels to Athens, Ga., two weeks later to compete against SEC rivals Georgia, Alabama and Auburn. The league’s wildcard and championship matches follow two weeks later.
McKenzie Siroky — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
Around the same time will be the U.S. selection meet for the Short Course World Championships, which will take in Westmont, Ill., Oct. 28-31. Currently, that meet is absent from Tennessee’s 2026-27 schedule, so it’s unclear if Siroky will attend, but she would need to make the trip if she wanted a chance at representing the U.S. at the Short Course World Championships in Beijing.
Whether or not she pursues the short course meters season, Siroky will face plenty of tough competition throughout the fall. Louisville’s Anastasia Gorbenko, who placed one spot below Siroky in the 100-yard breast at last year’s NCAA Championships, looms in the first CSL match. Depending on how Tennessee performs, Siroky could have early contests against defending NCAA champion Eneli Jefimova of NC State and the swimmer with whom she tied for second at the 2026 NCAA meet, Anita Bottazzo. Having previously competed for Florida, Bottazzo transferred this offseason to Indiana.
That group represents the core of breaststrokers expected to challenge for the NCAA title in the 100-yard race next March, with Siroky the lone American among the group. Moreover, she will again serve as a lynchpin of Tennessee’s medley relays, which also return backstroker Jillian Crooks, butterflyer Mizuki Hirai and freestyler Camille Spink from last year’s squads which finished second and fourth on the national level. Matching or surpassing her rivals’ splits could make big differences in hotly-contested relays.
And before too long, the focus shifts back to the 50-meter course as Siroky enters the critical pre-Olympic summer, when she will seek to retain her title among top U.S. breaststrokers and reinforce her value in individual and relay events at major meets. The United States will select its World Championships team in June in Indianapolis, with the World Championships to follow a month later in Budapest.
As she moves into this busy stretch of racing, Siroky has plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Compared to most of her rivals, she is still relatively raw from a swimming standpoint, having completed only three years of year-round training in her life. This summer, she lobbed huge chunks off her best times, going from 30.05 to 29.64 in the 50 breast and from 1:07.66 to 1:05.32 in the 100, the latter representing an incredible 2.34-second improvement.
Given that recent track record, expect Siroky to continue building her endurance and 100-meter pace in the coming years, with a 1:04 swim potentially not far away. On a U.S. women’s team stacked with veteran performers, Siroky is the new face but already putting a scare into her rivals around the world.