Mario McDonald Becomes First Michigander to Go Sub-19 in the 50 Yard Free

2025 MEN’S BIG TEN CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Dates: Wednesday, February 26–Saturday, March 1
• Location: Jean K. Freeman Aquatic Center, Minneapolis, MN
• Defending champions: Indiana men (3x)
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• Teams: Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, USC*, Wisconsin
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The Michigan’s Swimming Legends project, which works to recognize and catalogue achievements by swimmers from the state of Michigan, says that Mario McDonald became the first Michigan native to go sub-19 seconds in the 50 yard free on Thursday morning at the Big Ten Championships.

McDonald, a 5th year senior at Ohio State, swam 18.97 in the heats. That leaves him behind teammates Matthew Kling (freshman – 18.84) and Daniel Baltes (senior – 18.96) as the 3rd seed for finals.

According to MSL, that breaks the record previously held by Arizona State’s Cam Peel, who swam 19.03 last year.

All-Time Best, Michigan Natives, 50-Yard Free

• Mario McDonald – ’25 – 18.97
• Cam Peel – ’24 – 19.03
• Tyler Ray – ’25 – 19.08
• Jack Wilkening – ‘25 – 19.25
• Oliver Smith – ’18 – 19.37
• Skyler Cook-Weeks – ’22 – 19.37
• Nik Eberly – ’21 – 19.38
• Cameron Craig – ’17 – 19.50
• Camden Murphy – ’21 – 19.50

While, as usual, the definition of a “native” can be a bit fluid, but MSL relies mostly on where they went to high school. McDonald attended Detroit Catholic Central High School in Novi, Michigan, graduating in 2020. This swim is a massive breakthrough for him: his previous lifetime best was a 19.57 done at a Last Chance meet in 2023, and he stalled out there for a few years.

Going sub-19 in the 50 yard free isn’t the rarity it once was (21 NCAA swimmers had already done it this season coming into this week), and so it is a bit surprising that nobody from a deep swimming state like Michigan had ever done so.

The LSC Record holder for 17-18s is Gus Borges, who is a native of Brazil and did that time while swimming at Michigan. Henry Schutte swam 20.01 as a 15-16 at the 2018 Michigan High School D1 State Championship meet, and after a couple of seasons with the Virginia varsity, wound up in collegiate club swimming.

That swim by Schutte remains the Michigan High School State Championship D1 Meet Record as well. Peel’s 19.87 is the overall record.

Other top sprint candidates include Ben Sytsma from Grand Rapids Christian, a freshman at Texas A&M who went 19.96 at last year’s state championship meet, but who wasn’t able to better it this year.

The state of Michigan is kind of an interesting place to be a club swimmer. It has large, suburban populations, and lots of Dutch genetics built for sprinting, and the scene has historically been dominated by 2-3 large clubs.

While the focus of those clubs has fluctuated over time, they’ve generally been really good at producing middle-distance and distance swimmers. The origins of Club Wolverine, the dominant force on the east side of the state, was heavily influenced by Michigan and Jon Urbanchek (it operates more autonomously now than it did then), which meant a big middle-distance/distance tradition.

Others of the big clubs have had lots of middle-to-distance heavy coaches at the top of their leadership as well.

That means that the waves of great high school sprinters haven’t necessarily hit Michigan the same way that they have hit other strong swimming states.

McDonald is an even more interesting story because he was a relatively-late comer to year round high school swimming. He was a summer leaguer through 8th grade before joining the high school team at DCC, and didn’t first join club swimming until the fall of 10th grade, meaning that he did a lot of development and growing and racing before being influenced by those club traditions.

But his high school coach at Detroit Central Catholic, Jessica Stoddard (formerly Brutz) was a Pennsylvania high school state champion in the 50 free, and went on to be a Big Ten finalist and Olympic Trials qualifier, so that may have had a different influence on his teenage career.

He also swam for a smaller club, dROP Aquatics, which gave him space outside of the Club Wolverine/MLA bubble to develop differently. Moving into club swimming at such a late stage would have made it hard to fully develop the base of a middle-distance or distance swimmer.

All of these things came together at the right confluence for McDonald to work the title of ‘late bloomer’ to perfection.

Finals begin at 5:30PM Central time on Thursday, and McDonald will be in lane 3.

Edit 2/27 8pm

That didn’t last long. Just a few hours after McDonald became the fastest Michigan native/first Michigan native to go under 19 seconds in the 50 free, Michigan’s Tyler Ray responded to the challenge and swam 18.83 in the Big 10 final.

Ray is now the fastest Michigander by .04, jumping from 3rd to 1st.