Water Polo, Swimming
Favorite athlete: Caleb Dressel
Favorite team: EAGLES!
Favorite memory competing in sports: On the way home from a swim meet, I accidentally punched my friend in the nose and made it bleed; most exciting bus ride ever!
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: At a morning swim practice I slipped while diving off the blocks and completely ate it. I cut up my entire leg from my hip to my toes.
Music on mobile device: Any song me and my teammates can scream in the locker room
Future plans: Attend Ohio University to study exercise physiology and swim, go Bobcats!
Words to live by: “Go ham or go home” - Madi Voss
One goal before turning 30: Graduate college, start a career and adopt my own pets
By Ed Morrone
Caroline Dunigan has spent so much of her life in and around swimming pools that at this point it would be no wonder if she sprouted gills.
There are swimming families, and there are the Dunigans. Caroline’s father, Dan, has deep roots in the North Penn swimming community that go back decades. Dan Dunigan was an all-state swimmer at North Penn High School where his daughter is currently a senior, graduating in 1990 before moving on to coach at the North Penn Aquatic Club (NPAC). So, it wouldn’t be hyperbolic at all to say that Caroline literally grew up on the pool deck.
“My dad used to coach way back when, and he used to bring me to meets when I was still in a stroller,” she said. “I really started to love it once I got to high school, but I’ve been swimming my entire life.”
Dunigan began swimming competitively when she was 6 or 7, according to Jeff Faikish, the varsity swim coach at North Penn and Caroline’s first coach at NPAC. Faikish and Jason Grubb, the girls water polo coach at North Penn where Caroline spent the last two seasons as the varsity goalie, have known and coached her since she was a youngster, with both maintaining that they saw greatness from an early age.
“We’ve known Caroline her entire life,” Grubb said. “Her dad coached me when I was younger at NPAC, and the Dunigan family has been part of this swim community for a long time. She’s just a stellar athlete, extremely fast and one of the best swimmers in the state.”
This isn’t just coach speak from Grubb, as Dunigan has the credentials to back his words up. She finished second and fifth in the 50 and 100 freestyle, respectively, at last year’s state championship. Although Dunigan herself came up just short (her 50 free race came down to a photo finish, according to Faikish), she helped earn her team enough points at states to deliver North Penn its third state championship as a team in the last four years.
Not only that, but as the goalie on Grubb’s water polo squad the last two seasons, Dunigan helped lead North Penn to its fifth and sixth consecutive state titles.
Her prowess in the water led Dunigan to a swimming scholarship with Ohio University, a Division-I program, and she will begin swimming for the Bobcats next winter. However, until then, Dunigan still has some unfinished business to tend to, as she hopes to add a state gold medal to her long list of accomplishments before she moves on from the North Penn swimming incubator that has shaped so much of her life to this point.
“I’ve always loved being in the water,” she said. “As I got older and started training harder, like most swimmers I hated practice because it’s super hard, doing it every morning, day and night, day in and day out. But I love my teammates, I love the meets — especially the end-of-season ones — and I love the swimming in general.
“Getting second place at the end of last season, it’s only made me hungrier for first. That’s my goal this year, to beat the girl who beat me, to make her work so hard to beat me. One of the things I always try to do is improve myself in any way I can. I’ll set my goals based off how I’ve done previously, so it just always leaves room for constant improvement.”
This is the type of intensely competitive attitude that Dunigan brings to the pool anytime she jumps into the water. Although Dunigan, according to her coaches, doesn’t have the typical long, tall swimmer’s body, she makes up for what she lacks in height with ferocious drive and off-the-charts athleticism. And on top of that, Dunigan thrives off naysayers who doubt her abilities simply because of where they deem her deficient, such as her height.
“Caroline has a very unique and amazing swimming mind,” Faikish said. “In her mind, nobody is going to deter her from what she is going to set out to do. She doesn’t care where a shot is in water polo, because she’s going to stop it, just like she’s going to beat the person next to her in swimming.
“Her competitiveness is special. She may not be very tall, but she has the ability and is ridiculously strong for her size. Her drive and motivation are what separate her from the rest of the kids who swim. I don’t care if the girl next to her in the 50 free is a foot taller, she’ll be competitive because she wants to win that badly.”
Another advantage in Dunigan’s arsenal is that she by no means rests on the laurels of her talent alone. She is a stingy goalie in water polo and an extremely accomplished swimmer, but she never expects to get by on skills alone, utilizing a relentless work ethic in everything she does no matter how much success she achieves in the water.
“Whenever I swim, I don’t think about my ‘disabilities’ such as my height,” she said. “I think of how my legs will keep me going and that I am going to use what I do have to make my opponents work hard with what they have in order to try to beat me.
“Each year our teams come into the season knowing that everybody is out to get us. No one wants to see us win again, and we face that challenge head on. We never think, ‘Oh, this is easy, oh, we’ve got this.’ Instead, we always talk before games or meets that we are going to go out there and treat every one of them like it’s the state final and make our competition play up to us, as opposed to us playing down to them.”
In addition to her water polo and swimming responsibilities at North Penn, Dunigan swims year-round with NPAC. Earlier this year, she competed at the Middle Atlantic Senior Championships, finishing runner-up in the 50 free, and she also holds the Winter Juniors standard in the 50 free, according to Swimming World. The extra reps have only helped her get better, as evidenced by the fact that she improved her finish in both the 50 and 100 free from her sophomore to junior seasons at the state level.
Dunigan chose Ohio University over Bucknell and Duquesne, saying that Ohio just offered the complete package of what she was looking for in a college. She bonded with future teammates and coaches during her unofficial and official visits, and on top of that, the school offers her desired major of Exercise Physiology. She’s not sure exactly what direction she’ll head with that degree in 2024, but expressed a desire to go to graduate school to possibly become a physical or occupational therapist, or perhaps an athletic trainer, depending on which specific parts of the field she grows to love. Her interest in exercise physiology stems from a shoulder injury she suffered as a seventh grader, and she credited her doctor at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with sparking her interest in medicine.
When she’s not swimming, which isn’t often (“When I’m not swimming, I don’t know what to do with myself,” she cracked), Dunigan loves to go hiking with friends in Evansburg State Park. She loves getting out in nature so much that she has a personal goal to visit every national park in the United States; so far, she’s been to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in Montana when she was in middle school, and last summer she and her family checked off five parks in Utah: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Arches and Capitol Reef.
Additionally, Dunigan just this week signed up for Spikeball Club at North Penn, and is also involved with the school’s Political Activism Club and Unified Track in the spring, where she and her fellow students compete with special needs kids.
“I love North Penn, and I want people to know that I love North Penn,” she said. “I’m always wearing my school gear because I want people to know where I come from and that we are a force to be reckoned with.”
Both of her varsity head coaches are going to miss her tremendously after she graduates. Faikish didn’t even want to talk about life without Dunigan - who has her entire senior season still in front of her - because life without her just won’t be the same.
“She’s a rock for us, a rock for me,” Grubb said. “I can speak freely with her and we have an extremely good relationship. She understands what I want, and she’s willing to adjust and accept coaching and take in all the information I throw at her because she knows it will allow her to flourish. When you have athletes like her, they are just a joy to coach.”
Added Faikish: “Each kid is special and unique, but what separates Caroline from other kids is that no matter what I’ve said to her, from the time she was an entry level child in the sport - I could challenge her and she would find a way. It’s a testament to her family support structure that she has in place. If you lay a challenge in front of her, she has the mindset that there is nothing she can’t do. She’s going to beat it, surpass it, achieve it and find a way.”
The respect and gratitude goes both ways.
“I think both of them have pushed me to my limits, my breaking point,” Dunigan said. “They have both definitely made me better overall, especially my mental strength, which is stronger than I ever thought it could be. There have been times when there were things I didn’t think I could do, but they have always had faith in me.
“Them supporting me and breaking me down the way they have, it’s only made me better. They break me down and then build me back up.”
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