McKendree Women Started Their Season With Tragedy—but Found Triumph | St. Louis Magazine
The water polo team built by Colleen Lischwe soared to new heights in the months after her tragic death.
Today, the McKendree University women’s water polo team kicks off the first game of the NCAA National Championship. McKendree’s inclusion would be big news on its own. It’s the first time they’ve ever made the NCAA tournament, which includes just nine teams across the U.S.—and typically few, if any, teams from the Midwest.
But this year, the private university in Lebanon, Illinois, about 30 minutes east of St. Louis, has even more reason to take pride in its season. The team lost its head coach in a fatal car crash in January, just as the season was getting underway—and they’ve been led in her absence by a 25-year-old in his first head coaching gig.
“It’s been an interesting year,” says Alex Figueras, who was only named the women’s head coach a few weeks ago after handling the job on an interim basis. “We had one of the lowest moments and some of the highest moments in the same season.”
Figueras is the first to credit Colleen Lischwe as the person responsible for McKendree’s success. Lischwe had twice been named Missouri Female Water Polo Player of the Year at Kirkwood High School before becoming an Academic All-American at Marist College in New York and twice participating in the NCAA National Championships.
After coaching at Kirkwood High, Lischwe landed a coaching job at McKendree, and after being named the women’s head coach in 2017, also became the head coach of the men’s team the following year—making her the only woman head coach in an NCAA water polo program.
Then tragedy struck. Lischwe was on I-44 around 6 a.m. on Jan. 15, 2025, when she was struck by a semi. Her Prius fell off the highway to Vandeventer Avenue below. Lischwe, 35, left behind a husband and a 3-year-old daughter.
She also left a team in mourning. Figueras, Lischwe’s young assistant coach, was among those devastated by her death; Lischwe had coached his club team for a half-dozen years before they became colleagues. Suddenly he found himself trying to fill her shoes as the team headed into its first game of the season, less than two weeks later.
He recalls a team meeting with a sports psychologist, who explained that, tempting though it was, they should try to resist focusing on “winning one for Colleen” or making all their efforts about her. “You don’t want this to be the only thing that’s driving you, because at a certain point, things are going to go back to normal, or whatever normal looks like,” Figueras recalls him explaining. “When that happens, then you lose your motivation.”
The very idea seemed shocking, he says. “When he brought that up, it seemed weird, because I was like, things are never going to be normal again, right?” But as winter turned to spring, and the team kept winning, it began to make more sense.
“It’s not to say that we’ve moved on, because I don’t think we ever really will,” Figueras adds. “Like, there’s that little unspoken bond that I think we’re always going to have with this group and that is always going to be that extra motivating factor, that we can hear her voice still pushing us.”
For Figueras, Lischwe’s death brought responsibilities he wasn’t sure he was ready for. A graduate of Saint Louis Priory School, he’d gone from playing club sports to competing in college to returning back to St. Louis to finish his degree at Washington University, where he graduated with a double major in marketing and English. He soon fell into coaching.
“Most people, I think when they get into this world, they get in as an assistant, and then they start trying to work their way up to eventually go be an assistant at a top five program, or go be a head coach somewhere,” he says. “And that was never my goal. My goal was always I wanted to do it until it wasn’t fun anymore, and then I would get out of it.”
Guiding the team has given him new appreciation for the job. In April, McKendree won its conference championship for the first time; the team finished its season with a 21–7 record.
Says Figueras, “It’s been cool to develop these relationships, and that’s the part that I’m enjoying the most. I think I’m starting to find my way and figure it out.”
He’s gotten support from another person who knew Lischwe for years—his own dad, Miguel. A former college player for Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Miguel Figueras has spent the last 25 years coaching teams in the St. Louis area while teaching second grade in Clayton. But this spring, McKendree offered him the head coach position for its men’s team—and so next year, father and son will be working together, father taking the lead with the men, son with the women.
Miguel Figueras says he’ll miss his job at The Wilson School, but he jokes that his new duties won’t be all that different: “In a lot of ways, I’ll still be around seven and eight-year-olds when I’m working with college freshmen and sophomores!”
Miguel Figueras knows no one can fill Lischwe’s shoes, explaining that she did a great job of looking out for all her players, many of whom came from so far away to participate in McKendree’s program. “Colleen was always the force in making sure those kids were well taken care of,” he says.
But he’s also proud of his son. “They’ve just picked up right where Colleen left off,” he says of Alex and his assistant coach, 23-year-old Breno Tebet.
And despite not being quite old enough to parent the team, the fledgling head coach has found a way to mentor its athletes, his father says.
“It’s like he’s got 23 little sisters,” he explains. “He’s always been a very mature kid, but we’ve seen a lot of growth in him here.”
Both father and son were heading to Indianapolis yesterday for the tournament, and Alex Figueras was trying to set realistic expectations. They have a strong chance against Wagner College in the first round, he says, but Stanford is “like UConn women’s basketball” (read: not an easy foe).
He adds, “I don’t want to count ourselves out, but I think that definitely will be a challenge. But getting into this is a big deal for us, and we want to definitely not just be like, ‘Okay, we’re just happy to be here.’”
And no matter how this topsy-turvy year ends, there’s always next year. Alex Figueras will be back, and so will all but one player, he says. The graduating senior is a standout, but having so many players returning should give the coaches a lot to work with. The team Colleen Lischwe built should have plenty of victories to come, even when there’s a new roster of players who can no longer hear her voice pushing them.
