The Cal men have announced their 2025-2026 competition schedule. Like the women, the men’s program also have all of their dual meets in California.
The program will open their season at UCSD October 9-10 for the Triton Invite. They then will travel to Stanford on October 24th to face Stanford and Arizona State in a two day tri-meet. The second day of competition between the three teams will take place at Cal’s home pool, the Spieker Aquatics Complex. There is only one dual meet in November as the team hosts Stanford on November 7th.
Its first trip out of the state will be to the Minnesota Invite for midseason. That is the most notably midseason meet that takes place after Thanksgiving.
A Friday dual meet against USC kicks off the 2026 calendar year on January 16th. The men will then host Pacific on January 29th before traveling to Stanford on January 30th.
The postseason begins with the ACC Championships that are being held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA from February 15-21. Georgia Tech is also home to the 2026 NCAA Men’s Swimming and Diving Championship that are scheduled from March 25-28.
The Cal men finished 2nd at the 2025 NCAA Championships with 471 points, just 19 points behind Texas. They enter their second season as a member of the ACC after they won the conference title in February finishing over 200 points ahead of Stanford as Cal had 1271.5 points and Stanford scored 1065. The team welcomed the #5 ranked recruiting class this fall led by Ryan Erisman.
Will be an interesting year all around. Of note: E Moraes not on roster on website. Mid-season add, or no longer to be on roster?
Cal is always late to post the entire roster.
Are all the CA duel meets because of budget considerations? Are there ACC rules about how many conferences duel meets they need? I’m confused.
Could be because of the political climate and the number of international swimmers on the roster.
I would assume it’s largely due to budget constraints. As far as I’m aware conferences do not have requirements for a minimum number of in-conference duels.
Undoubtedly for budgetary reasons – Thanks to Grant House, that’s the impact on non revenue sports at colleges nationwide.
Cal renovated a football stadium during the pandemic and was already in massive debt. The swim team just had one of the biggest endowment donations in history, I don’t think this is a swim team budget case, although the greater university athletics budget is in shambles. The fact is Cal doesn’t have to leave the state to have good competition outside of the midseason and conference, but don’t be surprised to see Cal individuals out of state at world cups, us open, etc.
Stanford and Cal rivalry goes hard