Kameron Chastain Named Interim at Notre Dame; Irish Repopulate Men’s Swimming Roster

Kameron Chastain has been promoted to interim head coach at Notre Dame after Chris Lindauer took the job as the head coach of women’s swimming & diving. The school has also begun rebuilding it’s men’s swimming & diving roster after the program was suspended all of last season over accusations of gambling and team culture issues.

Notre Dame has updated Chastain’s title but has not made a formal announcement, which implies that his is a caretaker role while the search for a permanent replacement is underway.

Maybe the bigger news is the re-emergence of a men’s roster for Notre Dame, which during the suspension season listed only two names, both divers, who remained eligible for competition.

There was one high profile transfer away from the program midseason last year: Olympian Chris Guiliano, who completed his eligibility with the NCAA Championship Texas Longhorns.

Beyond that, there was little activity from the Irish in the Transfer Portal. Some athletes may not be eligible to compete again this season, depending on their level of involvement in the gambling scheme, while others may have chosen to leave the sport.

The updated roster does not include freshmen, but does include 13 swimmers.

Among them is two of the team’s top four scorers from the 2024 ACC Championships when the Irish finished 2nd: diver Benedict Nguyen, who scored 78 points to rank behind only Guiliano, and Marcus Gentry, who was the team’s 4th-best scorer with 62 points. Tommy Janton, who scored 53 points, Dillon Edge, who scored 43 points, and 6-point scorer Lucas Logue are also both back on the roster.

Edge, Gentry, and Janton also swam on relays at the 2024 NCA Championship meet.

Eight of the 13 swimmers on the updated roster are sophomores who would have been freshmen last season and were not on campus when the violations occurred. That was a highly-touted class that included names like Sean Atkinson, Charlie Mayr, and Croatian sprinter Hrvoje Tomic.

While this roster could change, this gives the new head coach at least a tangible roster to work with on their path forward.

Notre Dame listed 38 men on the swimming & diving team in their latest Federal data reports. Among high performers who did not use up all four years of eligibility but are not on the updated roster is Tate Bacon (46 ACC points), Otherwise, the 2023-2024 team was a Notre Dame roster with a lot of seniors and 5th years whose collegiate careers would have been over anyway.

The roster doesn’t include incoming freshmen, with names like European Junior Champion Maksim Manolov from Bulgaria, Evan Conti from Illinois, Min-Gyo Jang from South Korea, and Zack Oswald from Pennsylvania all committing as part of a big incoming class for Notre Dame. All but Jang (we couldn’t find social media profiles for him) still list Notre Dame ’29 (or a close approximation) on their Instagram accounts. Jeremy Kelly, a transfer from Texas, is also expected to bolster their ranks.

While rebuilding a program and team culture after a year away is a unique challenge that not many coaches have experience with, the Irish will, at a minimum, have some talent to rebuild around in coming seasons.