Women’s 2026 NCAA Championships: The ACC Absolutely Dominates NCAA Scoring

2026 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships

• Wednesday, March 18 – Saturday, March 21, 2026
• McAuley Aquatic Center, Atlanta, GA
• Defending Champions: Virginia (5x)
• Championship Central
• Preview Index
• Psych Sheet
• Live Stream
• Live Results
• Live Recaps
  • Prelims: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4
  • Finals: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4

While the SEC and ACC were relatively close on the men’s side in terms of NCAA points scored this year, the ACC were untouchable at the women’s championship.

The ACC scored a whopping 1762.5 points at the NCAA Championships, nearly 50% of those available. That was nearly double the amount scored by the SEC, and nearly 1,000 points more than the Big Ten scored.

The final Power Four conference, the Big 12, scored just 38 points at NCAAs this year. Only six of those came from the conference champions ASU, with Arizona (21 points) and Cincinnati (11 points) outscoring them. Cincinnati’s Joleigh Crye and Arizona’s Eleni Gewalt were the only individual scorers for the conference, both scoring in the 100 breast.

Mid-Major swimmers scored 30 points, including a first top-16 finish ever for Indiana State courtesy of Grace Cummings‘ 15th-place finish in the mile.

The Ivy League scored just eight points, all of them individual. The conference champions Princeton were one of two teams to score, with Penn scoring six points to the Tigers’ two.

The ACC’s dominance is clear to see. They topped 100 points in three events – the 200 IM (113), 200 back (101), and 200 breast (109),  and provided 11 of the 16 scorers in the 200 IM. They had the most scorers in all but one event (1650 free), and scored the most points in all but two (1650 free, 500 free)

The ACC had 136 scoring swims at NCAAs this year, with the SEC (73) and Big Ten (64) in a relatively close battle for second. Mid-Major swimmers placed in the top-16 on eight occasions this year, the same number as the Big 12 and Ivy League combined.

Individually, half of all swims from ACC swimmers at the meet scored points – 107 out of 214. That led to an incredible 1,078.5 individual points for the conference, more than half of the 2,015 available for the 13 individual events. As an average, each ACC swim yielded 5.04 points – the equivalent of a 12th-place finish.

While the ACC put a monstrous number of swimmers into scoring positions, the SEC and Big Ten scored almost the same number of points per scorer – 10.06 and 9.75 to the ACC’s 10.08. The SEC had 47 scoring swims, five more than the Big Ten, and scored 63.5 more points.

Relays were a little closer, although the ACC still led the way by over 200 points. The conference had only three more scorers (29) than the SEC (26), but those teams scored nearly six more points per swim than their SEC counterparts. The Big Ten was again slightly behind the SEC in both scoring swims and points per scoring swim, but is in a clear third place.