LIU Plans for Men’s Swim Team to Compete at ECAC or Metropolitan Championships

Division I Long Island University is currently planning for its newly announced men’s swim team to compete at the Eastern College Athletics Conference Championships or the Metropolitan Swimming Championships, the program’s sports information director told SwimSwam. The school announced the program addition Monday.

The school also says that they have not yet determined how many scholarships they will award for men’s swimming.

The Metropolitan meet includes NCAA Division I, II, and III teams from the New York metropolitan region, including formerly the Long Island’s Post campus women’s team prior to the merger with LIU Brooklyn to form the current LIU program. Teams compete at an annual three-day conference championship held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in February. On the men’s side, Rowan has won four of the last five years. On the women’s side, Rowan has won the last three years straight.

Currently, the Metropolitan Championships play host to 17 women’s teams and 15 men’s teams, with University of Mary Washington due to join the conference in the 2020-2021 school year. Similarly, the ECAC holds an open-division championship meet with over 20 teams on both the men’s and women’s sides.

While both are considered conference championship meets, many schools that participate in those meets have other ‘primary’ conference championship events. The conference does sponsor a women’s championship.

Many of the school’s other sports programs compete in the Northeast Conference, which doesn’t sponsor a men’s swimming championship.

Long Island is a private school with an enrollment of about 16,000 students. It has two main campuses, LIU Post and LIU Brooklyn, as well as non-residential programs at LIU Brentwood, LIU Riverhead, and LIU Hudson at Rockland and Westchester. The athletics programs at the Post and Brooklyn campuses recently merged.

In adding a men’s swim team, Long Island becomes the tenth institution to add the sport for the upcoming season, according to the CSCAA.  Since losing programs at Eastern Michigan and Wright State in 2018, Division I men’s swimming has added or is in the process of adding five programs.

With the addition of men’s swimming this week, co-ed ice hockey last week, as well as women’s gymnastics in March, LIU now sponsors 32 teams, which is twice the Division I minimum. The NCAA limits the number of scholarships schools can offer by sport; the number for men’s swimming for the 2019-20 season was 9.9, and Long Island has not yet determined how many scholarships it will offer for men’s swimming.

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Hook ‘em
4 years ago

Cscaa says 11 schools not ten, but think they probably mean 11 teams. Either way-won’t matter with the cuts coming.
http://www.cscaa.org/news/202054/liu-latest-to-add-mens-swimming

Wild Bill
4 years ago

ECAAs is arguably the fastest conference meet outside of SECs. Good on LIU for competing with the big dogs from the get go!

Admin
Reply to  Wild Bill
4 years ago

The winning time in the women’s 200 free relay at ECACs would have been last at Big Tens. Same with the men’s. So, I suppose you’re making a joke?

I_said_It
Reply to  Wild Bill
4 years ago

Huh?

Swim Coach
4 years ago

LIU Post ceased to have a women’s swim team when they merged with LIU Brooklyn. There is no LIU women’s team currently competing in the metropolitan conference, their team currently competes in the Northeast Conference. The last season an LIU team competed in the Metropolitan conference was the 2018-2019 championship season, which was the last year LIU Post sponsored women’s swimming.

The Metropolitan Conference also only has 17 women’s schools and 15 men’s schools heading into the 2020-21 championships season, not 22. There has been a lot of membership change over the last few years with programs being dropped, and some joining temporarily and then leaving, with the most recent change being the addition of NCAA Division III University… Read more »

About Torrey Hart

Torrey Hart

Torrey is from Oakland, CA, and majored in media studies and American studies at Claremont McKenna College, where she swam distance freestyle for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps team. Outside of SwimSwam, she has bylines at Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and The Student Life newspaper.

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