SPS Athlete Continues to Break Records

Milly Kirkman ’25 is making the most of her one season of SPS swimming and diving.

BY KRISTIN DUISBERG

Last fall, halfway through her third season as a member of the SPS girls varsity soccer team, Emily “Milly” Kirkman ‘25 decided she was ready for a new challenge and made the switch to cross country. After running in only four races, she earned Lakes Region All-Star and NEPSAC All-League Honorable Mention honors for her contributions to varsity scoring, including a top-10 finish at the Lakes Region Championship. In December, she ran a half-marathon — her first — and took first place in the female 19-and-under division. Next fall, Kirkman will matriculate to Dartmouth College as a recruited diver, a sport she took up in earnest only three and a half years ago. As SPS introduces swimming and diving as a varsity sport this winter season, Kirkman is already rewriting the record books at NEPSAC school pools across New England, starting with her debut competition at Phillips Academy Andover on Jan. 18.

Kirkman grew up in Massachusetts in a “sporty” family, a competitive dancer and gymnast, soccer player and alpine skier. She took part in a summer swimming and diving club league for several summers but set both diving and gymnastics aside when her mother relocated to Vermont and she enrolled at Proctor Academy to focus on alpine skiing. “I loved skiing and it really fed into my adrenaline-rush mentality — I’ve always been a little fearless that way,” Kirkman says. “But I also realized pretty quickly that I missed diving.” After her first year at Proctor, she reached out to Dartmouth coach Chris Hamilton, who also coaches an age-group team for younger divers and agreed to take her on.

“I improved pretty rapidly, just because of my gymnastics background, the mentality that goes along with that and the body awareness,” Kirkman explains. “Some of those gymnastics habits were hard to break, like how I would go into tucks, or the way I’d throw my head back, but having been a competitive athlete for so many years in an individual sport definitely helped a lot in terms of my coachability.”

Having felt an immediate connection to St. Paul’s School when she traveled to Millville as a member of the Proctor girls varsity soccer team, Kirkman came to SPS as a Fourth Former in fall 2022 and set to work on balancing her many athletic and academic interests with her continued training at Dartmouth. In addition to competing on the SPS soccer and alpine teams, Kirkman discovered her love of humanities and opportunities to share her passion for service and social justice as a Missionary Society officer and a writer for The Pelican. The expansion of the SPS winter sports roster to include swimming and diving means that, for the first time in her diving career, Kirkman has the opportunity to represent her school.

She’s wasted no time in making her mark. On Jan. 18, as her swimming teammates took on Austin Prep, Kirkman suited up to showcase her skills on the 1-meter springboard against divers from Andover and Loomis Chaffee. Her six-dive score of 291 points not only gave her a decisive victory in her first SPS competition, it also eclipsed the Andover pool record of 246.7. She took first place again in a meet against Berwick Academy the following week. As her lone SPS season wraps up, she’s looking ahead to the NEPSAC Division 1 diving championships.

For all her success in and beyond the pool, Kirkman says there’s one recent experience that she found humbling: training with her swim teammates while awaiting the arrival of the diving board. “For someone who’s been involved in this sport for a while now, I have never really been a swimmer, and for someone who had just come out of a pretty intense endurance sport, I was surprised by how hard swimming laps was,” she says. “But it’s been great learning a new sport.”