Chase Kreitler On Pitt’s Historic Growth Over The Last 4 Years, Transfer Portal Thoughts

Pitt’s men’s and women’s programs both had historic 2025-2026 seasons. The women’s team finished tied for 16th at the 2026 NCAA Championships, their highest in program history. The men’s team finished 20th, their best finish in 73 years.

Head Coach Chase Kreitler arrived at Pitt in summer 2022 after previously spending time at Cal. This marked the fourth season under Kreitler’s guidance.

“This year’s results really just showed what we built in terms of the culture of the last four years and also just the work that we put in. It can take multiple years of hard work,” Kreitler said. 

Kreitler pointed to senior Claire Jansen as an example of this growth and hard work over the four years. Jansen arrived at Pitt as an unranked recruit coming out of high school. As a freshman during the 2022-2023 season, Jansen became the first freshman since 2006 to qualify for the NCAA Championships for Pitt. She made the 2024 NCAA Championships as a sophomore and then scored her first point at the NCAA level in her junior year with a 16th place finish in the 100 backstroke.

As a senior this past season, Jansen climbed the NCAA ranks and scored 27 individual points at the 2026 NCAA Championships with a 4th place finish in the 200 back and a 7th place finish in the 100 back. Kreitler spoke of Jansen saying, “Every year we scaled her up, and we started to see some of those breakthroughs.”

Kreitler knew that this year could be special. He told the team at the start of the season, “This is the year, there’s always gonna be future seasons and you’re gonna have to do different things, but this year can be really special.”

The season delivered on that expectation, and Kreitler pointed to several factors behind the team’s success. Both teams “peaked at the right time,” he said. Numerous factors contributed to that peak including the individualization and specification that Pitt offers, Kreitler’s background in exercise physiology, and learning and changing what hasn’t worked in the past.

“We’re not afraid to write eight different workouts for eight different people in that time period in between, ACCs and NCAAs,” Kreitler said. He continued, “Related to some things that haven’t worked, some of the feedback from my staff, my second year, was that just felt like, ‘hey, one of the things was, we need to do a little bit more kicking in the second semester, right?’ And so we made that adjustment. Now looking at the group of athletes that we have, some athletes need to kick pretty hard, really close to a competition, and they actually get confidence from that, and some athletes need to not do that much on their legs for three weeks even before a major meet. So that’s some of the things that we just continue to get better and better and better at.”

Kreitler graduated with his master’s degree in exercise physiology from Eastern Michigan in 2014. Associate Head Coach Gideon Louw also has a master’s degree in exercise physiology as he graduated from Florida State in 2014. The two are able to combine to apply their educational backgrounds to their athletes.

Kreitler said, “I think the Gen Z student athlete really likes to know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and while it’s really important to get the physiology right, it’s just as important to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. I think one of the growth points or one of the things that we’ve done better at is taking more time to talk through, ‘hey, here is the physiological plan for the week, you know how we’re prepping for different dual meets, how we’re prepping for midseason, which we handle a lot differently than some other teams, and then what that looks like for championship season.'”

He continued, “I think that’s something that I’ve changed and probably gotten better at over the last four years is just talking about the why. We have more team meetings, and ultimately that boils down to the culture aspect of the team and taking time to slow down and just talk about what does it look like to truly have a championship team culture? What are the actual behaviors and actions that we want to be true of our program and that we want to hold each other accountable for? I think that has really helped, and getting the team’s input right on that, and I think each team has a little bit of a different personality from year to year, but there’s just some base things that if we want to be elite swimmers and divers these are things that we’re gonna do.”

With both programs having success over the last four years, Kreitler said that he has noticed a bump in recruiting but emphasizes the program’s ability to develop as well as its coaching staff as a whole.

“If I zoom back four years ago, we have definitely seen a recruiting bump, and as you continue to have high level performances, it’s only going to help that. Ultimately, I think what really is gonna help is we’ve now [had] three athletes that have finished in the top five at NCAAs in the last two years…it just gives Pitt swimming and diving more national recognition. There’s people on the West Coast that might not know a lot about how good of an academic school the University of Pittsburgh is or even where Pittsburgh is,” Kreitler said. 

He continued, “I think, another really key aspect is it really just shows that we can develop. If you look at the recruiting classes that we’ve brought in, we’ve brought in some people that certainly have the core values that we want by academics and want to do this year round at the highest level. We always talk about trying to find people that are not major partiers…We found people with talent, but we have not gotten, a top 20 domestic recruit, and yet we’re having people finish in the top eight at NCAAs.”

Transfer Portal

With recruiting and the ever changing landscape of college sports comes the transfer portal. One of the biggest names in the transfer portal this spring is Pitt sophomore Julian Koch who went from not qualifying for the 2025 NCAA Championships as a freshman to scoring 28 individual points at the 2026 NCAA Championships including a 4th place finish in the 100 free and 8th place finish in the 100 fly.

“Ultimately, I think at some level, the culture that’s been in football and basketball, is now trickling down into swimming and diving, where people are going to be more mobile, unless there’s some kind of rule change at the congressional level,” Kreitler said. “Right now, we’re operating kind of under a circumstances that have not really been the case for the 14, 15 years prior that I was coaching. This is the end of year 17 and things are they’re honestly just quite a bit different, right?”

“We’ve now got revenue share and NIL and there was always some differences between schools in terms of everybody had 14 and 9.9 scholarships for the most part. If you were fully funded, and then you were recruiting on campus and academics and whether you had a long course pool and just a lot of different factors. Now there’s just, there’s some schools that have a lot more scholarships than other schools. There’s schools that have revenue share money and NIL opportunities, and certainly we’re trying to be really competitive in those spaces, and that’s important to me, to be competitive. I think that’s important to the [Pitt] athletic department to be in a position, to be able to compete for having relays hopefully in the top eight in the near future, and that sort of thing.”

Continuing the conversation on the transfer portal, Kreitler spoke of some frustration after hearing feedback from his athletes at the 2026 NCAA Championships.

“In no way, I should be very clear, not accusing any coaches at all of wrongdoing, but I will say one of the feedback pieces that we got from a couple of our athletes at the NCAA Championships is that other athletes on other teams were more or less recruiting them, saying that they should come swim at their school,” he said. “There’s obviously a little bit of a difference between somebody that you’ve known from your club, your entire life, and maybe you’re thinking about making a change for a variety of reasons, that could be academic, it could be training wise, but when you have people that you don’t know, that are telling you to come to their school, I think that’s something that just across our sport we need to do a good job, as coaches understanding that’s happening, and then stopping it and making sure that our teams aren’t doing that, because ultimately it’s not good for the sport and it’s frustrating. It doesn’t mean people are still going to transfer, even if that wasn’t happening, but I think that’s one thing that is certainly frustrating, because I just don’t feel like that should happen.”

As college swimming continues to evolve, Pitt’s rise under Kreitler highlights the program’s emphasis on long-term development and culture, even amid the challenges of an increasingly fluid landscape.