South Carolina’s 1000+ attendance for their tri meet against Texas A&M and Virginia Tech last weekend turned some heads. It feels as though college swimming is finally starting to build some momentum for spectators at dual meets – which as I wrote last week, is a valuable leg of demonstrating the importance of a program to a university.
South Carolina became at least the 3rd school in the last 12 months to pull in over 1,000 spectators, alongside Howard University and the University of Texas.
But what if I told you that we’ve seen this before? And it wasn’t that long ago, either.
Flashback 2014
In 2014, the early days of SwimSwam, there was one unusual weekend where the stars aligned and college swimming was king.
Missy-mania pulled in over 1,500 fans for a dual meet between Cal and Arizona, with another 200 turned away at the gate.
On the same weekend, an “overflow crowd” of 1,000+ spectators showed up to watch the Florida Gators sweep Auburn.
The 800-seat Ralph Wright Natatorium at Louisville was filled to standing-room only capacity.
Swimming was buzzing.
This was the tail end of Phelps’ career, Missy Franklin was a phenomenon, college swimming national championship meets were bumping against their capacities, rivalries were raging, and people were excited about swimming.
When I read what I wrote back then, a lot of the core still rings true. Superstars bring in fans, and Missy was a superstar. Big rivalry meets bring fans.
What I really love is the attendance of other varsity athletes that helped drive the crowds. Louisville’s women’s team was in attendance at the Kentucky meet, and swimming earned that with a wildly-clever performance at the volleyball team’s games that season, where the swimmers each wore 25 articles of clothing over their speedos, and stripped down one article for each point until the Louisville women won a set.
What’s frustrating is that that wave of attendance didn’t really catch fire and continue between then and now.
I think that means that the product, then, wasn’t good enough to make people need to return. Is swimming inherently boring? I don’t think so. Is the format of a swim meet a little lack luster? It might be.
The scoring isn’t always obvious, the meets aren’t often competitive, and the energy isn’t always there.
So now the tide is rising again on college swimming dual meets. It may be time to start a bigger conversation about how to rewrite the format of dual meets and make them more fun to watch. If so many college coaches say that nothing matters until March, then they should be fine with changing the format of dual meets, right?
The simplest ideas revolve around presentation. Tell us the team scoring for each race. “Texas won that event 12-7!!!” engages the fans beyond just the event winner.
More moderate ideas involve tweaking the scoring to keep team scores tighter or even thinking of different formats that reward risk-taking or lineup-changes.
But what if we really go off the wall? What if winning a conference dual meet gets you 20 points at your conference championship meet?
This seems like a drastic change, but remember: basketball added a 3 point line, volleyball changed to rally scoring, and softball moved the pitcher’s mound back 3 feet, and while all of those changes were controversial at the time, they all resulted in the betterment of those sports. Those sports are all thriving now.
People are trying to show swimming love, but swimming isn’t necessarily giving that love back.
Let’s shift the paradigms and really try something different to reshape our sport for the better. Let’s do something crazy and see if it works.
When we come back in 2032 and have this discussion again, let’s make it about how to convince our ADs to build bigger facilities to handle our sellout crowds.
I’m ready. Are y’all?
20 pts per dual meet win..how is that going to work with conference realignement?
To be transparent, SC has some kind of point system for students to put toward football tickets by attending other sports. If what I heard is correct, swimming is double the points of any other sport.
I’m not totally sure I’m right, but that’s what I heard.
It was a fun meet, but weird because the scoreboard didn’t change until after the race started. Never ever seen that before.
Yes that’s true—the South Carolina athletics account posted about this meet getting double points. I appreciate the sentiment behind points systems but I worry that they may lead to a “show up to games for points and leave at the break” mentality from students.
I hear you but disagree to a level. I would consider the athletic department’s job is done – they’ve brought people in the door. Now it is up to the swimming & diving team to engage the fans and keep them in their seats.
The number of foreigners is killing swimming. Think back to 2014, there was just a sprinkle of foreigners. Now every countries best swimmers that are college age come here to train and get a free education. Save the scholarships for Americans!
Agree 100%
Wow, it’s hard to express how strongly I disagree with this post.
It’s remarkable–and yet often unremarked-upon–how huge of a benefit the U.S. gets from its constant influx of some of the world’s most talented individuals across essentially every area of life. This has been the case for over 80 years now, and it’s this way for no other country. It’s an incredible, special situation that is not some law of nature, but rather the result of opportunities and policies like the one you’re decrying.
Great article! And comments too! I’m going to echo a lot of them below. I love dual meets, and have a lot of thoughts about this.
The one factor above all else that makes a meet exciting is when the meet MATTERS. That’s what brings the fans, that’s what gets the celebrations after a big race, that’s what puts the tension in the air like every molecule is pulled taut.
So making dual meets more exciting means making them matter in our heads and hearts, and ultimately, we as a sport (swimmings, coaches, fans, etc.) have decided that end-of-season races are what we really care about. Ask any swimmer or coach what they’d prefer:
- (A) Crush it every dual
… Read more »I would recommend more invites with 8 teams or so including local rivals to get local fans. Sorta like texas invite next month with Stanford and hopefully A&M, Houston and a couple of more top 10 programs. Schedule during a football weekend and include the visiting team in the invite and get the folks traveling to the game to attend. Televise!!!! Full Stadium!
Have these meets at the sports Showcase facilities Texas, Stanford, Greensboro, the new South Florida pool.
Yeah idk that 4 day, 8 team invites with 3 hour sessions are going to really excite the local fan base.
Would need to structure it more like ISL/DMU Classic.
1 dollar beer night… watch the frat guys come rolling in
They should be reaching out to all the local club and high school teams and getting the athletes to come watch meets in person.
Then there should be some sort of activation on campus to make people aware a swim meet is happening and maybe incentivizing them to attend it.
Would work for Saturday meets but a lot of them have practice or school during weekday dual meets at 12 or 2p.
Like others have said, parity makes for an exciting meet, regardless of times. Not sure how to create that though. Maybe all the swimmers have a “price” based on best/recent times and on the day of the meet each coach gets to “spend” only so much on their line-up.