Tickets for the 2025 NCAA Women’s Division I Swimming & Diving Championships are now on sale. All-session passes are available for $130 for the meet at the Weyerhauser King County Aquatic Center outside of Seattle. That’s the same price as last year.
While the best tickets along the center of the 25-yard competition course are sold out, or have only ADA accessible tickets available, there are still plenty of seats left at the far corners of the natatorium, including some at the start end of the pool.
- Go here to buy women’s tickets.
- Go here to buy men’s tickets (On sale January 21)
The KCAC is one of the largest permanent natatoriums in the country with 2,500 seats for spectators along its entire course and will host both the men’s and women’s championships.
The last time Federal Way hosted an NCAA Championship meet was in 2012, where the grandstand was woefully underfilled. In the decade since, sellouts (or near sellouts) have become the norm, in some cases with tickets selling out before they even go on sale to the public. Teams have first access to tickets from the meet and the best teams receive the best seats.
Pro Tip: while there is assigned seating for the NCAA Championships, nobody checks tickets and many people buy tickets and don’t show up for certain events. Even if your seat doesn’t look great, hawk around for a vacancy or stand behind the good seats for a better view.
It looks like a better crowd is due for this year’s meets, though one coach who attended a club meet at the facility last weekend had concerns. The coach said that two of the three air exchangers, designed to keep fresh air coming into the pool, has failed and the other was functioning at only 33%, which would put future meets at the facility in danger if emergency repairs aren’t approved.
- Women’s Championship: March 19-22, King County Aquatic Center, Federal Way, Washington
- Men’s Championship: March 26-29, King County Aquatic Center, Federal Way, Washington
- Prelims start daily at 10AM Pacific Time and finals start daily at 6PM Pacific Time. Diving prelims begin around noon Pacific Time each day.
Don’t worry about getting tickets. It’s in the middle of nowhere for swimming. Stands will be sparsely filled like they are every time it’s out there.
Las Vegas should build a super pool that could host NCAA’s or even the World Aquatics Championships because that would be a new place to host it. Vegas has so much money to bid to host College Football Championships as they almost won the bid for Big Ten’s. I don’t like being in Vegas but watching NCAAs would be worth it.
why on earth would any developer in Vegas throw money away like that lmao
I heard the pool was being shut down today to immediately start on repairs before NCAAs
Hopefully the facility is actually functioning when Big XIIs and NCAAS roll around. This past weekend two of the three air exchangers were broken and CO2 levels were over 2500 at times and the chloromines led teams to leave early. Sad that place cant get their stuff together.
Should just have in Indy or someplace similar.
Please no Indy. I cannot go back to Indy.
You a park bench somewhere in Indy with your name on it.
There are so many more teams and spectators that are drive able to Indy. Federal Way has a great facility but with the Northwest Universities not supporting swimming, it seems like a bad location to be the host.
This sparked curiosity in me. Within 200 miles of Federal Way, the population is 9.6 million. Within 225 miles of Indianapolis, the population is 28.7 million.
That being said, we can’t always just award every meet to the most population-dense big facilities in the country if the sport wants to grow. If everything is in Indianapolis every year*, it will be great for those 30 million swim fans, but terrible for the other 300 million folks. I think it’s fair to put it on the west coast once every 10 years. Wish California would build a big indoor swim stadium, but I understand why they don’t.
It’s not like folks within driving distance of Indy are starved for opportunities to… Read more »
No problem with moving the meet to the West Coast but almost all of the spectators are going to be flying into Seattle. When the meet moves to the West Coast, how about Stanford, ASU, or USC.
I know Indy had trials but when was the last time they held NCAAs. It feels like it has been a while.
You have to be kidding me, 2024 Men’s NCAA’s was hosted at IU Indy
Good point-that is pretty recent! lol!
Much of this has to do with who is bidding to host, and the decisions on when and why to bid is why Austin, Georgia Tech, FW, and others aren’t always hosts. There are MANY great facilities that CAN host (based on seating capacity, quality of the facility, and other factors that make those worthy of hosting D-I meets), but not all want to host or get selected when they bid.
What’s the list of hosts in the new world, where we expect bigger crowds? You’ve listed the big 3, plus Indy and Greensboro.
Gabrielsen (though deck space is tight)
Minnesota with temporary spectator seating
If we presume it has to be indoors (IDK, does it?), what else fits the bill? I feel like the 1,200 seaters are sized out at this point.
Ohio State, Tennessee, and University of Michigan could host. Once you look at diving and seating capacity, the selection gets thin. I can’t remember the meet ever being outdoors. I don’t know if other facilities could create some temporary seating for a national championship.
All of those facilities sell out in minutes. Michigan has really poor deck space for the side of the meet, and Tennessee has such a shortage of locker room space that they put temporary bathrooms outside. There’s really not a lot of great options for hosting. IU Indy is the only facility where it’s easy to accommodate all spectators and athletes. Doesn’t mean it should always be there, but that and Greensboro being the next closest to checking those boxes should be the most frequent host sites.
Tennessee and Ohio State – yes
Michigan is too small, I think. Gotta be 1,500 off deck these days to get in the conversation IMO.
I assumed that maybe lots of those places had good seating. Iowa, Tennessee, A&M, Wisconsin, Auburn, OSU… Some of those places are also pretty far out of the way: A&M is a 90 minute drive from Houston, etc.
Our public funding and the idea of “the public good” is much different than in Europe, Japan, Australia, and some more affluent South American nations. All have absolutely world class facilities in most of their major cities. Australia has several pools that I can think of that are better than Texas or Indy, and Great Britain has funded major facilities all over, all capable of hosting major domestic and international events. It would be nice to have public initiatives like that.
I think the US invests just as much in public sports facilities, but swimming is just further down the pecking order.
The public school district I went to HS in spent $70 million on a 12,000 seat football stadium. And it’s the second stadium (to go with a 7,200 seat basketball arena).
I was having this conversation with someone earlier. The U.S. perspective on swimming is this: that the economics of every pool being built has to be driven by public use/training rental revenue. We have tons and tons of lap pools – almost every suburban subdivision has one. Then we look for these smaller ones that can serve ‘community needs.’
What we need is a swimming stadium that is… Read more »
bring it to UMD – the DMV loves fast swimming
I love the UMD facility and I live close enough to drive- but it would feel weird having a university host the meet who cut their swim team. I think other schools that have been supportive of their swimming programs should get the nod before UMD.
It also only seats 1,000 upstairs, which is not nearly big enough these days.
And it doesn’t have platforms. In the early 2000’s, they hosted ACC, and diving was held off-site at a pool 20+ miles away, via the Beltway.
That’s an even better reason.
What time are finals sessions at? Wondering if I’ll need to take some time off work.
6:00 Pacific Time for finals, 10AM for prelims for swimming
@jonathan, so unless you work the night shift or in Hawaii, you should be good!