University of Alaska Fairbanks Athletics

A former swimmer for the Alaska Nanooks, Scott Lemley enters his 11h full season at the helm of the current women’s team and 15th year as a college coach including five years heading the Nanook’s combined men’s and women’s program from 1982-1987. He had started that program after the school had been without a swim team for nine years with the former NAIA team being discontinued in 1973 after just five years. He competed for the Nanooks as a student-athlete from 1970 through 1973 on the NAIA team.
 
After a hiatus of eighteen years, Lemley once again built a swimming program from the ground floor. Since 2005, he has seen his squads improve steadily year by year and, in some instances, meet by meet.

Last December his team competed in a major invitational with nearly 800 swimmers in attendance and for the second time in a row won the college division trophy. For the first time since the Nanooks began attending this meet, two swimmers, freshman Martha Hood and senior Margot Adams, were the 1^st and 2^nd place individual high point award winners.

During the 2014-15 season, Lemley had his first four-time conference champion when senior Margot Adams won the 100 yard butterfly for the fourth straight year ending her college career undefeated in PCSC competition. That four-peat had had only been accomplished one other time in the history of the conference. For the second year in a row the Nanooks won the 200 medley relay and broke the conference record. During the 2013-14 season the Nanooks and two other teams went under the existing record in this event with ALASKA coming out on top. Again in 2015 the top three teams in the conference were under the Nanook’s record from the previous year and again the Nanooks posted the fastest time resetting their own record. Five of Alaska’s swimmers were named to the All-Conference team, some in multiple events.

For the seventh straight year Lemley took a squad of swimmers to the NCAA Division II National Swimming & Diving Championships. Last year five Nanooks qualified for the “big dance” and returned home with nine All-America accolades and two new varsity records. Margot Adams finished in the top five in the championship final in the 100 yard butterfly for the fourth straight year, broke her varsity record for the fourth straight year and ended her college career as a 13-time All-American. For the first time in the history of college swimming, stretching all the way back to the late 60s when the first NAIA level college swim team was formed, the Nanooks had an All-Alaskan All-American relay. The foursome included two swimmers from Anchorage (senior Margot Adams and sophomore Victoria Adams), a swimmer from Palmer (freshman Katie Stark) and a swimmer from North Pole (freshman Martha Hood). Lemley has taken 16 different swimmers to the NCAAs coming away with one National Champion (Bente Heller in the 100 yard backstroke in 2013) and 63 All-America certificates.

Nanook swimmers under Coach Lemley have had just as much success in school as in the pool being named to the Scholar All-America Team list for the 16^th and 17^th times for the fall and spring semesters of last season. Their team GPA average of 3.49 in the fall was ranked 7^th in the nation out of nearly 100 Division II Women’s Swimming Teams, their highest showing in program history. In July the Great Northwest Athletic Conference announced that 14 University of Alaska Fairbanks student-athletes had been selected to the GNAC Faculty Athletic Representative's Scholar-Athlete Award of which the swim team had the highest number of representatives; four swimmers were named to the list. The award is handed out to student-athletes who compile a cumulative grade point average of 3.85 or better