NAIA Announces Selections for 2025 National Championships

2025 NAIA Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships

• Dates: Wednesday, March 5–Saturday, March 8
• Location: Elkhart Aquatic Center, Elkhart, IN
• Defending Champions: Keiser women (3x); St. Thomas men (1x)
• Live Results
• Live Stream
• Championship Central: Men | Women

The official psych sheets for the 2025 NAIA Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships have now been released. The Championships will be held at the Elkhart Aquatics Center in Elkhart, Indiana, from March 5-8, 2025.

Swimmers with automatic time standards (based on the 3rd place finish at the last three NAIA National Championship meets) earn an invite to the championship meet, and swimmers are added one-by-one to each event until the events have an even number of swimmers per event, and this is then repeated until all the swimming spots are filled.

Once a swimmer is invited individually, they can swim up to two other individual events in which they have at least a provisional standard. If a swimmer has an A cut in one event, they don’t need a provisional standard in their other events to be invited. Historically, about 20-21 swimmers are invited per event to the men’s meet, and about 30 are invited per event to the women’s meet, although this year the cutlines have fallen around 22 for men and 25 for women.

Each team can enter up to 18 athletes per gender (including alternates).

After some contentious relay selections in prior years, the NAIA has simplified its relay selection procedures for the 2024-2025 season. Schools with 4 or more qualifiers are now automatically entered in all relays, however they can only use swimmers who have already qualified individually on those relays.

Men’s Meet

• Psych Sheets
• Athletes by Institution (including alternates)

Noel de Geus leads the way for the Keiser Men, who have the joint most qualifiers at 17 along with Cumberlands and St. Thomas. The German international and 2023/24 NAIA men’s swimmer of the year holds three #1 seeds, in the 50 free and both breaststrokes. That includes a 51.68 in the 100 that would likely qualify for D1 NCAAs, and he has some room to drop – his NAIA record from last year stands at 51.43 and he has a long course best of 59.98 from last summer. He’s matched in those seeds by teammate Isaiah Aleksenko who enters fastest in the 100 back, 100 fly and 200 fly, as the Seahawks hold 14 out of 18 top spots coming into the championships.

26 schools are represented, with a total of 140 swimmers and eight divers. St. Thomas (Fl) were somewhat surprise winners last year, running out just 16 points ahead of Keiser (640.5 to 624.5) as the two were over 200 points clear of Cumberlands in third. That was a meteoric rise for a program only launched in the 2020-2021 season. This year however Keiser are back with a vengeance, seeded to score a whopping 725.5 points – nearly double St.Thomas’ 373.

Almost every one of the cutlines is faster than last year, most by more than half a percent. We see the biggest drops in the 1650 free and 100 back, both over 1%, but breaststroke is the most consistent across distances. It’s also a stroke where the current NAIA record holder, Noel De Geus, is entered, and there are two other record holders entered in Isaiah Aleksenko (100/200 fly, 45.94/1:44.55) and Kevin Keil (400IM, 3:47.95). All three of these swimmers have broken records this season, although for De Geus it was the 50 free (19.54) rather than in breaststroke.

Women’s Meet

• Psych Sheets
• Athletes by Institution (Including Alternates)

It’s the same three schools leading the way for the women. St. Thomas and Keiser have 18 qualified swimmers apiece, closely followed by Cumberlands with 17. Keiser were the runaway champions last year, beating St. Thomas by 250.5 points, and are seeded top again this year with 650 ponts.

30 schools are represented in total, with 160 swimmers and 8 divers qualifying for the championships. Last year’s NAIA swimmer of the year is the one to watch for the women as well, with Lindsey Wilson’s Maaike Broersma holding three top seeds including being the only women under 2:00 in the 200 backstroke. Broersma’s teammate Kirsten De Goede and The Masters’ freshman Katherine Dyer are close behind with two apiece in the 100/200 free and 200/400 IM respectively. In each of their third events, they are seeded second behind the other one – the 200 IM for De Goede and the 100 free for Dyer.

Dyer is one of only three swimmers from Masters (the others being Camryn Bussey and Kylee Sears), a drop from the five they’ve taken the last two years. The biggest effect of that will be that we won’t see her on any relays. Given she ranks second and fourth in NAIA history in the 100 and 200 freestyles respectively, she could have put down some historic splits. All three of their swimmers are seeded in scoring position in at least one event, but 126 of their 197 points last year came from relays – even with near maximum points from Dyer, Masters will take a tumble down the rankings from their ninth-place finish in 2024.

There are some much bigger drops than on the men’s side, with backstroke and fly standing out. The backstroke cutlines are on the 24th swimmer this year, and those times would have been only just outside scoring in 2024. All in all it sets up what should be a fantastic meet, and one that is likely to see more records fall: Broersma (100 back, 53.48), Dyer (200/400 IM, 2:00.33/4:16.63) and Nikoline Biltoft-Jensen (100 breast, 1:00.34) have all set records this season already, and De Goede has been within a hundredth of Julie Woody‘s all-time mark of 49.24 in the 100 free.