DENVER – Barbara Perkins is in her sixth season as the head coach of the University of Denver women's triathlon team and leads this year's squad that has a mix of veteran leadership and young freshmen eager to prove themselves.
 
Denver's 2025 roster features four first-year rookies in Lucrezia Gowdy, Mia Stanley-Hunt, Jenna Topott and Olivia Wimberger, as well as seniors Coco Diemar and Elizabeth Harita and junior and 2023 individual national champion Maira Carreau.
 
The Pioneers began their five-race 2025 regular season on Aug. 30 at the Southern Hills Triathlon super sprint, a race they have now been to three times and serves as a nice warmup to the full sprint races to come in the fall.
 
Denver returns to action on Sunday, Sept. 14 as it competes in the Desert's Edge Triathlon at Highline State Park near Grand junction. DU's season then transitions to central Illinois for the Prairie State Cup in early October before Western Regionals on Oct. 26 in Fort Worth, Texas, and the National Championships on Nov. 8 in Tempe, Arizona.
 
Perkins recently chatted with DenverPioneers.com about the start of the season and the approach to the rest of the 2025 campaign.
 
What was your overall takeaways from the season opener in South Dakota?
 
"We're a very young team this year. We're very eager and very coachable and hungry. We had some individual meetings and team meetings leading into this weekend, and we kind of called it a fact-finding mission for us to go test out where we're at and bring that back. We get to jump right back into the Desert's Edge Triathlon this weekend in Grand Junction. This season always starts really quickly, and we're just gelling as a team and building team culture and adjusting to the altitude. So there's a lot of different factors, but I'm excited to see our potential and where we're going to go from here."
 
How has the pre-season and first race evolved over the years?
 
"I think because triathlon is still an emerging sport, it's still growing. Every year is a little bit different. A lot of other teams already have their schedules set well in advance, and you know, they have multi-year deals, or they go to a race in a different state, and then the next year, the other team comes back and you host them. We just don't have that kind of infrastructure yet, so it's still establishing. Southern Hills is a race that we've gone to three times now, so it's become kind of our season opener. We're pretty familiar with the course, and even just seeing how the course and the town has evolved. The competition has gotten stronger every year, so it's nice to see the sport growing and getting more support across the country."
 
What does it mean for Maira Carreau to compete on the national stage in both Collegiate and Canadian Nationals?
 
"Maira is such a fun athlete to coach. She knows herself really well. She's very good at expressing herself, and we have really been talking over the last several months about just making the sport fun and just having the joy of racing. I think with this new crew of freshmen coming in, and just the joy of that, it was very apparent. It was fun to see her, and she's excited about racing again and building on her own season. She's really invested in the NCAA season this year, so I'm really thankful to have her leadership and be able to work with her and guide her through this journey."
 
How have you seen seniors Coco Diemar and Elizabeth Harita's grow over the years?
 
"Elizabeth kind of came in under the radar as an unknown when I recruited her, and she's had a stellar NCAA career. She made it very apparent that she wanted to be a leader for this team. She's been talking about it. It's great to see her step into that leadership role and be very vocal. She's really good at communicating what the team needs to me. That's also nice to have that in a captain and senior leadership. Coco has a family history of triathlon. She's been around the sport her entire life, so it's really nice to have her experience and expertise for the team. She's just really become like, kind of the social captain for the team. She has everybody over at her house. They make dinner, they do their nails—it's also nice to have her giving that to the team as well."
 
What excites you most about this year's freshman class?
 
"I think just like their potential. They're very open to being coached, and we have those three girls (Carreau, Diemar, Harita) that I just spoke of as our senior leadership, so it's a great balance. It just feels like we're all kind of in this together, and I think that their excitement for the sport is kind of contagious. It's making me excited to come to practice. I think it's also bringing that joy and excitement back to the girls that have been doing this for a long time. I think that they have great potential as leaders, as athletes, and I'm really excited to see where they go from this season and moving forward into their college careers too."
 
What do you want to get out of your quad in the second race of the year at the Desert's Edge Triathlon near Grand Junction?
 
"It's a great opportunity because it's in-state. We can drive to the race. We're at altitude. It's also jumping up to the sprint distance, so it'll be our first one of the seasons. It'll still be kind of early in the season for us to kind of see where we're at. We only really started speed work this week following the race, so going into Southern Hills, we were just doing more like aerobic volume and tempo. We did one hard workout that's a team relays that we do traditionally every year, so it's really fun to see the different strengths that they have. Transitions have been a huge area that we're working on, so just tightening those things up makes a big difference. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we're eager to do it, and we're happy as a team, so it's an exciting time."
 
How do you build during the season so you're racing your best in November?
 
"I think the last couple years we've actually had our best race at the regional championships. That's been interesting, just kind of nailing in where we're peaking. We're also moving back the regional championships this year. Usually it's in the middle of October; it's at the end of October. It's two weeks out from nationals, so that adds another kind of layer of targeting key workouts when we're doing peak volume. It's always an evolving process, no matter what year. Even if you're the national champions, you always want to come back and like, how do you recreate it? You have a different team, different strengths. We're doing a more slow roll into this season. We're going to try to build our volume, then the tempo and then the speed. We've done that in the spring season, and it's worked out really well. We've gone to the Clermont Challenge every year in March and had a really great season opener, so I'm trying to kind of replicate that a little bit more for our postseason racing and regionals and nationals."