Saint Mary’s College, a Division I school in the Bay Area, will be adding men’s and women’s swimming and water polo for the 2026-27 school year.
The new programs are expected to create opportunities for approximately 80 student athletes at launch, and are projected to expand to 100. The development of the program is “already underway – including the hiring of coaches, identifying training facilities, and recruiting student-athletes.”
The University will be offering athletic scholarships for both the swimming and water polo teams.
They will join the 18 other sports sponsored by the school. Swimming will compete in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, which has seen a lot of changes in the last few years, and will have seven new programs for the 2025-26 season.
Women’s Water Polo will compete in the Golden Coast Conference, competing with other California schools like Loyola Marymount and Fresno State. Men’s Water Polo will join the rest of the school’s athletics teams and compete in the West Coast Conference, which consists of other swimming schools Grand Canyon University and Seattle University.
Swimming and Water Polo are huge across the state of California and particularly in the Bay Area. They will join Stanford, Cal, San Jose State, and Cal State East Bay as schools with swimming programs in the area.
The Bay is also home to major club teams such as Quicksilver Swimming, Santa Clara Swim Club, the Pleasanton Seahawks. Currently the area is home to superstar club swimmers like Luka Mijatovic and Mikayla Tan.
This addition comes at a time when many schools are cutting their swimming programs. We recently saw Cal Poly, another California school, cut both their men’s and women’s programs.
The addition of water polo is also significant. There are currently only 27 division I schools that sponsor men’s water polo and 36 schools that sponsor women’s polo. Most of these programs are in California with 83 of 122 total colleges that offer water polo existing in the state. Of those schools, 45 are not four-year schools and are community colleges which only offer two years of school and eligibility.
President Roger Thompson addressed this landscape, saying “While many NCAA institutions across the country are scaling back athletics, Saint Mary’s is making a bold commitment to expand opportunities for students.”
He told SwimSwam that he loves watching the Olympics and he is “proud” of what the United States has done, particularly in the pool, and he wants Saint Mary’s to be able to contribute to that success and legacy.
When the program starts, the athletes will train and compete at the nearby Campolindo High School, which is home to the Soda Aquatic Center, an Olympic-size pool. The school is aiming to build a state-of-the-art facility in the coming years with support from donors, alumni, and friends, along with “aquatics enthusiasts”.
Their goal with a new facility would be to not only provide pool space to the University programs, but at times when the varsity teams are not using the facilities, open them up to club teams of both swimming and water polo as well as competitions to give back to the community.
The school’s first goal is to hire head coaches for the programs with position postings going live on September 15. Saint Mary’s Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics, Mike Matoso said “We are committed to hiring coaches who not only bring a track record of competitive success, but who also embody the values that make Saint Mary’s unique.”
President Thompson took over the role of President on July 22, 2024, and he is largely responsible for the idea behind creating the program. He said that when he moved to the East Bay last summer, he went to the grocery store, and ran into a woman with bottles of water and ice for her child’s swim team. When he looked around the parking lot, he saw a large number of cars with some kind of swimming or water polo iconography, and he realized he moved to a “hotbed” of aquatics in the country. “When you are sitting in the east Bay of California, you are in the heart of swimming and water polo.”
Last year, they began exploring aquatics, and speaking to experts to determine what the process of creating aquatics programs at the University would look like. Thompson said he believes “there are a lot of kids in California that would want to continue their swimming and water polo careers, and I want Saint Mary’s to be an option.”
Leaders at USA Swimming, such as Joel Shinofield the Managing Director of Sport Development, and USA Water Polo, like CEO Jamie Davis, helped advise the University of the best steps to move forward with the program. President Thompson said he was “deeply appreciative” to them and to people who care about the future of the sport. “This is an opportunity to be impactful, and at a time when programs are being cut, I want us to be contrarian.”
Sorry to be the sour grape here, but … St. Mary’s built a pool with 10 lanes and an unstructured (useless) bulb barely 10 years ago and intentionally did not build an Olympic pool. This raises serious questions about where the capital and commitment will come from to build the facilities needed to support these programs. Meanwhile, the plan appears to be to compete with the youth programs that have made the area “the heart of the Bay Area’s swimming culture” – programs that already have Campolindo oversubscribed. In less than two years, Bay Area swimming has lost the George Haines International pool and the facilities used by CROW, requiring a merger of two of the Bay Area’s largest teams.… Read more »
Saint Mary’s College made a great move to bring in Water Polo and swim teams.
Walnut Creek’s new pool is going out to bid soon!
Swimming only? Or swim and dive? Northern Ca and the bay area have great club teams and not a lot of diving options on college!
Appears to be just swimming.
St. Mary’s is in Moraga; where Olympic great Matt Biondi came from & swam also at Campolindo. I went to St. Mary’s College in the late 80s & had to train at Concord-Pleasant Hill since they did not have a Swim Team yet that time; they did have a sc pool though near the football field area. Good on SMC to have a Swim Program soon. Go Gaels!
Does this mean recruits of the class of 26 can reach out to get recruited for this college? Who would they contact?
I’d recommend visiting the Aquatics website that we (Saint Mary’s) just launched yesterday:
https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/smc-aquatics
If you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll find a form that one can fill out to express their interest. Good luck!
Will they have an Aussie pipeline in swimming like they do in basketball?
Let’s hope so! We love our Aussies!
This was a refreshing read. What a great attitude about aquatics from a university president! The future of the sport seems to be at smaller institutions without football programs where swimming can get the attention it deserves. It would be great to see a school like this really put money into the program and make it a national contender.
I see David Marsh posting videos about this on IG , is he involved in the process or maybe the coaching hire process?
Why does it feel like Marsh is always behind the scenes? I saw a talk from Bob that I think is a decade old where he says he’s always in the know and back then it was about the Dynamo swim club job, this must have been in the 90’s
David started his head coaching career at Dynamo in the late 80s so he would be in the know about that program
Oh shoot. Did not know that. Time to look that up
He would be in the know about the Dynamo program 2-3 decades after he coached there? Uh no.
The original comment mentioned David and Dynamo in the 90s so he certainly would have knowledge of the program at that point.
He is a very successful coach with many connections who happens to also live in the area. Any AD worth his salt is picking up the phone and his first 4 calls are to Durden, Marsh, Schemmel, and Lindauer asking for recommendations.
Real shame this was after my time there but happy that they’re finally putting this together!