2025 EDDIE REESE SHOWDOWN
- January 24-25, 2025
- Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center — Austin, Texas
- 25 Yards (SCY)
- Meet Info
- Live Results, also available on MeetMobile as “Eddie Reese Texas Showdown”
- Friday Morning Live Recap
- Friday Night Live Recap
- Friday Night Livestream
The University of Texas-hosted Eddie Reese Showdown is bar-none the highlight of the 2024-2025 college swimming regular season, featuring the defending NCAA Champions on the men’s side (Arizona State) and women’s side (Virginia), perennial top 5 program NC State, and the team that hired away the Arizona State head coach Texas.
A meet months in the making, with the coaches from all four programs working together to put on an event with a presentation worthy of the competition, Friday night’s televised session reported an official crowd of 2,331 spectators. While the NCAA doesn’t keep official attendance records in swimming & diving (one of the only sports where they don’t), this is the new benchmark for collegiate swimming and diving meets.
Only three other indoor pools in the United States have permanent spectator capacity for that many:
- The IU Natatorium in Indianapolis – 4,700
- Greensboro Aquatic Center – 2,600
- Jamail Texas Swimming Center – 2,500
- King County Aquatic Center – 2,500
Plus a couple of outdoor pools – like the Avery Aquatic Center at Stanford (2,500).
There are rumors of overflow crowds at some of these big outdoor pools in decades past, and record keeping isn’t good enough to rule out that there was a bigger meet at some point – but at least in the recent wave of excitement about college swimming, this is the biggest crowd yet.
The energy in the pool was electric; the live stream was exciting; the teams were engaged; and the swims were fast. Exciting formats and big crowds make for fast swimming, and fast swimming matters.
The only complaint of the whole night was that there weren’t enough folks working the beer line – a sentence I never imagined that I’d be able to attach to a swim meet.
Note: for those who don’t know Will, he’s a fun loving guy who loves swimming and loves joking around. We got to spend some time with him at Trials, and this Tweet is definitely tongue-in-cheek.
And yet they only had two people working the concession stand for Lappy Hour, and they were both unaware of the Lappy Hour until I told them about it and they text their boss to confirm. The line was soooooooo long to get a beer 😡 My life is so hard 😢
— Will (@willlerch) January 25, 2025
“sold out” – no – free of charge
Should have been $20 per. Tickets at that price would not have been attendance-prohibitive. In fact, even $30 would have been tolerable. Missed opportunity.
Meanwhile, just down the street at the football stadium, you can barely buy two Cokes for $30 …. let alone tickets
Related: what’s the keg record (beers sold) for a college meet? This shindig has gotta be up there.
The beers were sold by the can and there was no limit to the amount they were allowing each person to buy. Because the line was so long and he didn’t want to wait again, I saw one guy buy a whole plastic grocery bag full of beers 😂
In Austin they only sell seltzers 😂
Duke vs TN will feature 3 of women’s top breastroker in the country including bronze medalist at the last Olympics.
Kind of an interesting example of the economics of college swimming
ASU + Virginia probably spend $70k combined on travel and lodging for this meet
Then you are paying staff to man concessions and the doors, call it $4k
2300 fans, BUT they didn’t charge admission
It airs 1 session on the SEC network, no idea how much ESPN pays for that , but guessing its small, like $10k maybe
So even one of the biggest & most successful dual meets ever, still ends up losing $50k+ for the athletic departments.
I think they probably could have charged $15-20 per person and still packed it out , lots of people were turned away due to seating.
I’d be stunned if it cost $10k to air that session. ESPN wouldn’t have sent a crew. Guessing they had a student operated crew as part of a university production team manning the cameras, and unless they got a couple of exes to do commentary, they picked up the feed from the PA announcer, which is one of the guys USA swimming uses tor national meets. It’s not like the longhorn network days when a tv production truck rolled up. Production is much cheaper with streaming. I wasn’t there but that is how SEC network operates for events like this.
Is anything stopping other programs, aside from 6-lane pools, from adopting this type of strategy for in season “dual meets”? Especially mid-major colleges. Find 3 other schools at a similar tier as you, invite them to your 2-day 4-team “dual meet” showdown. Build the crowd size. Create an expectation that swim meets will not have seats to spare in the spectator section.
It takes people and creativity. That’s kind of the only limitations.
(And the licenses to sell beer).
Most programs (yes, their coaches) are unwilling to make the effort.
Not good enough, we need private equity to introduce some free market efficiency to swimming!
/s
How much was admission? Their pool is unique that every seat one can watch the competition pool. Not many indoor pools is like that. Stanford is similar I think.
Why didn’t they stream Friday am?
Admission was free and if you got there soon enough they gave you an awesome Eddie Reese koozie!