What Will It Take to Make an NCAA Swimming Dual Meet Championship a Reality?

The announcement of the landmark, albeit early-season, dual meet tournament to be hosted in October at Georgia Tech feels like a dream that would never end.

Countless shouts into the wind for some kind of head-to-head competition in NCAA swimming is coming to fruition, bringing a degree of satisfaction that there might, in fact, be somebody out there listening.

The dual meet, featuring Army, Auburn, Florida State, George Washington, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Minnesota, and NC State, will be the tip of the spear – an experiment in what could become the future of college swimming.

The format won’t be perfect right off the bat, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that it will, at a minimum, create a ton of buzz and interest – and as long as the format is developed from there, it could create a fundamental change in how college swimming operates.

There will be some proof in the pudding. While the meet does include some big name programs, like Georgia and Auburn, both schools with NCAA team championships, and perennial top 10 team NC State, it is without the best of the best like Cal, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Still – if there is data about interest in streaming broadcasts (and web coverage – which SwimSwam will have easier access to), and if an early-October meet can rival NCAAs, then there might not be a choice but to seriously consider a shift.

I’ve long thought that NAIA, NCAA D2, NCAA D3, and NJCAA should pioneer this format. While those divisions are becoming increasingly-faster, even the best D2 and D3 swimmers don’t come that close to the best D1 swimmers.

So what if the paradigm for those lower levels shifted, away from that singular championship meet (where times can easily be compared to D1) and toward pioneering a dual meet championship, allowing more of their student-athletes to shine regardless of any comparisons to Division I times?

For Division I, though, the single biggest hurdle is:

The Timing

The biggest challenge of hosting a dual meet national championship meet is how to time it. There will be a stubbornness to the existing championship and a desire to not interfere with it, because swimming has always been built around “how to go as fast as possible at a specific point in time,” and those dogmas are going to die hard.

Swimming is not the only sport to deal with this individual vs. team dichotomy. College tennis, for example, is in year one of a two-year pilot where singles and doubles championships were hosted in November, while the team championship will be hosted in May.

That is not the only option, but it does provide an interesting one. Most of the solutions I’ve heard with timing has involved leaving the traditional NCAA Championship meet as we know it, the one more focused on individuals than teams, at the end of the season, and putting a hypothetical dual meet championship at some point before that (or even move conference meets to mid-season).

The crux of making a true dual meet national championship work will be in the timing.

In broad strokes, there are three options that are most discussed:

• Putting the dual meet championship at the end of the fall semester
• Putting the dual meet championship in the spring semester before the NCAA Championship meet
• Putting the dual meet championship in the spring semester after the NCAA Championship meet

There are pros and cons of each, but I think there’s a viable fourth option worth including:

• Holding the traditional NCAA Championship meet at the end of the fall semester, and then leave the dual meet championship for the spring.

Of these, my favorite are holding the traditional NCAA championship meet at the end of the fall semester and holding the dual meet championship after the NCAA team championship meet.

Mid-Season Championship, End-of-Season Dual Meet Championship

Pros:

• It still gives an opportunity to isolate and focus on the mid-season championship meet.
• That meet could be held after finals (think mid-December) and not interfere with school
• Would allow teams to then reset and move forward with preparations for the spring semester without jamming the events together.
• The dual meet format could be spread out and mitigate academic impairment. A 64-team bracket, for example, could have rounds held every other week, culminating in a finale in early April.

Cons:

• Tradition of the end of season NCAA Championship meet
• Extended bracket could create travel issues/higher costs because of uncertainty
• What do you do with the conference championship meets?

End-of-Season Championship, Followed By Dual Meet Championship

In this format, one could qualify teams for the other. Two weeks after the traditional championship, the top 8 or 16 teams could advance to the dual meet bracket.

Pros:

• Keeps the traditional championship at the end of the season
• Prioritizes traditional championship, which could mean more buy-in from the more dug-in coaches
• Keeps more swimmers from the back-end of the roster engaged in training for longer
• Provides some ‘parity’ opportunity – top teams might have all 18 swimmers coming off their NCAA taper, while the #8 team might have 10 swimmers coming off an NCAA taper and their other 10 targeting their taper for the dual meet bracket

Cons:

• Back-to-back meets means a lot of time away from school (though basketball makes it work)
• This could make for a very long season for some teams
• Could be more interference with international trials meets (which could be viewed as a pro or a con, depending on your politics)
• Delays beginning of the international season (though the whole thing could be condensed and end in a similar timeframe)

Of course in any format we have to ask even bigger questions of ‘what drives the industry of swimming.’ Right now that answer is unequivocally two things: the allure of a college scholarship, and the Olympic Games.

Would this format change impact the United States’ Olympic outlook? Does this mean more of the best-of-the-best will leave college early to focus on Olympic preparation? Is that inherently a bad thing? And how quickly could the draw of a made-for-TV, high-octane dual meet bracket become a sufficient tradeoff?

The Format

The format – balancing starpower with team (and how that varies from NCAA Championship meet)

Any dual meet bracket format will be painful to start with, because rosters are incredibly top-heavy, but over time, this format could shift the way recruits make decisions, where lanes and opportunities at a smaller program could outweigh watching from the sidelines at a bigger program.

And that’s what isn’t ever really mentioned in this dual meet format: basketball’s March Madness relies on an “any given Sunday” approach to hook viewers. The possibility of a Cinderella run keeps interest alive.

The 40th best team in NCAA swimming, however, could race 1,000 dual meets that matter against Texas, and barring a wave of norovirus through the Longhorn team, they just aren’t going to win once.

That’s why I would advocate for a tight group of teams to start, with the hopes that this would drive some parity as recruiting begins to react to the new world.

Then there’s the scoring within each meet. I think for this to work, it has to reward depth – while allowing superstars to be superstars. Figuring out creative scoring setups (I’m not sure the current NCAA dual meet scoring really gets there) will help with this. I would propose expanding the number of events a swimmer can race in a meet, but simultaneously reducing the gap in points from a winner versus the rest of the field. More like 9-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.

That leaves room for a specialist to nip a win in their best race, while the real stars can swim extra events and rack up more points (as long as their fatigue allows them to).

There is still a lot to work out, but October’s meet is a great first step – and I think a compact pilot program with the true best teams competing should be the next. One step at a time, let’s find out if this thing has legs.