Where Do the Members of the U.S. 2025 World Championships Pool Swimming Team Actually Train?

Note: This analysis focuses on the American pool swimming roster.

USA Swimming is sending 46 pool swimmers to the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, and as is tradition in American swimming, the “clubs” that many of those swimmers represent are not the clubs where they primarily train, and in some cases, are not the clubs where they have ever trained.

A complicated history means some swimmers represent their childhood clubs (derived from a recruiting strategy for college coaches or local funding benefits), others represent clubs affiliated with their college programs, and others represent clubs that they are paid to represent.

While all of these representations are valuable in their own way, the representations are not particularly consistent in any way that, in aggregate, shares much information.

So I took a few minutes to reorganize athletes into the programs where they are actually training to try and parse out which training groups are getting swimmers onto World Championship teams. While clubs that financially support elite athletes, or age group programs that produce elite athletes, are important to swimming infrastructure, those are both different relationships than the training group that actually gets athletes over the hump and onto a team.

A Few Observations:

• Bob Bowman at the University of Texas gets a lot of heat for the fact that his training groups host some of the world’s best swimmers like Leon Marchand of France and, soon, Summer McIntosh of Canada, but that doesn’t mean he has lost sight of contributions to the American team. The University of Texas ecosystem (which includes collegiate undergrads and pros, men and women) is responsible for more members of the pool team at the World Championships than any other.
• The University of Virginia, with seven, is next-most, even though only one of them represented the “University of Virginia” at Trials. The women’s group, the best in the U.S. right now, is responsible for six of those, but the men got a breakthrough thanks to Jack Aikins.
• That Virginia list does not include Thomas Heilman. He was training exclusively with Cavalier Aquatics and Conor Hassard until he graduated from high school on May 21. On May 21, he started training with the University of Virginia squad a few days a week, though he remained with Hassard and Cavalier Aquatics a majority of the time. Now, he’s at Virginia full-time alongside other incoming freshmen Maximus Williamson, Josh Howat, and Madi Mintenko, though Hassard continues to write some of his workouts. Cavalier Aquatics felt like the best representation of where he was training heading into Trials.
• “It’s Complicated” is for Santo Condorelli, who made the team in the 50 free. He was training with Brett Hawke from fall of 2024 until Hawke joined the Enhanced Games, and is now training with Sean Kao‘s Aquatics Sports Performance pro/elite training group in California (more on that soon). He swam unattached at Trials.
• Bella Sims trained at Florida until the NCAA Championships, but has since been primarily with the Sandpipers of Nevada. That’s where we’ve categorized her for this list.
• Last year’s Olympic roster breakdown saw Virginia, Texas, Indiana and Cal all tied for the most swimmers qualified with six, though for Indiana, that included Mariah Denigan‘s open water qualification—she made the Worlds team in open water again this year, but that’s not factored into the count here. So, relative to 2024, Texas increased by four qualifiers, which is no surprise given the talent that has followed Bowman there in the last 12 months, while Virginia increased by one and Cal dropped one (which could be looked at as an increase with Ryan Murphy and Abbey Weitzeil both not competing). For Indiana, they lost two—Blake Pieroni didn’t compete, and Matt King missed the team. Florida dropped from five to three with Caeleb Dressel not in the field and Kieran Smith missing the team.

As always, because there is no ‘official registry’ of where athletes are training, this is to the best of our knowledge and wouldn’t account for anyone who snuck back to their old club under the cover of darkness.

2025 World Championships Pool Team by Training Group

The Full Roster Breakdown

Women

Men