The Big 12 Conference has announced that swimming and diving will return to the Greensboro Aquatic Center (GAC) for the 2027 Big 12 Championships. The meet will take place from Tuesday, February 23 to Saturday, February 27, 2027.
The conference is set to host their first championship meet there this week, with the meet running from Tuesday, February 24th through Saturday, February 28th, 2026.
“The Big 12 Conference is excited to continue our partnership with the Greensboro Aquatic Center,” said Big 12 Associate Vice President of Olympic Competition Lizzie Gomez. “As one of the premier aquatic facilities in the nation, the Greensboro Aquatic Center will continue to offer an outstanding championship experience for our student-athletes.”
Greensboro Aquatic Center will serve as another neutral location for the meet. The 2025 edition of the meet was held at Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatic Center in Federal Way, Washington, the same pool that hosted both the men’s and women’s 2025 NCAA Championships.
Prior to that, the championships were primarily held on campus at West Virginia or on campus at Texas. Texas was a member of the Big 12 until it joined the SEC in July 2024.
Big 12 Map – After Conference Realignment
The Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre Is much better than Greensboro. 2028 – look into it!
Conference realignment is weird. Big XIIs isn’t a meet that feels like it should be at GAC – that feels very “east coast conference”, but this is the NCAA now I guess.
That makes zero sense.
Will never understand why they won’t go to Houston (easy to get to, big enough facility {hosted PAC-12s in 2021}) or West Virginia (less convenient to get to but another high quality facility)
Yes, it’s a nice facility. But for the sake of travel, wouldn’t it make sense to be in Houston? And if you want a neutral site, would it be faux pas to have it Texas, A&M, Missouri, or SMU (all world-class facilities). Mid-Major conferences certainly have to qualms about hosting at other universities as “neutral sites.”
Although Houston is a great pool, I don’t think it would be large enough to host a combined Big 12 meet.
Yeah, deckspace is pretty limited.
I’d guess Houston’s pool isn’t significantly cheaper to rent than Greensboro, so the conference is going to look around and say ‘if we can have Greensboro at a similar price, we’ll take that one.’
Facts!
We had D2 NCAAs there (in 2009) before there was an “invite” system, which I’m guessing probably had overall more swimmers than what a Big 12 Championship would hold overall. It wasn’t bad from a deck space situation at the time that I can recall.