The annual Collegiate Swimming & Diving Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) meetings took place over the weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. Retired University of Michigan softball coach Carol Hutchins, the winningest head coach in NCAA Division I Softball history, was the keynote speaker.
The conference, an opportunity for coaches to network, included a breakout session of NCAA Division I coaches in attendance that has so far created the most buzz out of the weekend.
One of the big takeaways from these conversations is that there is widespread agreement that the NCAA Championships won’t be going back to Pacific Time anytime soon after several teams struggled with the long travel and time zone changes. Federal Way, which faced several technical challenges besides being at the Northwestern tip of the west coast, was especially derided.
Besides technical challenges, Pacific time made for very late sessions in the Central and Eastern United States, where most of the top teams are.
Part of the challenge comes from Federal Way being the only championship-caliber indoor venue in the Mountain or Pacific time zones right now. While far more of the top collegiate programs are in the Central or Eastern time zones, it seems equitable for them to not have to travel every year, but the facility availability in the western U.S. don’t support that right now.
This conversation has reportedly been had at the highest levels of the NCAA, including the board.
Most of the conversation has been around how to improve the viewability and fan interest in swimming, which extends the conversations that are being had every day on social media.
The breakout lasted about 90 minutes.
Key takeaways:
- Top mid-major programs continue to advocate for championship access via automatic qualifiers. One of the more interesting points they made is that mid-major swimmers can be active fans and drive ratings – one coach said his team watched NCAA Championships when they had a swimmer there, but not when they didn’t.
- One mid-major assistant coach was vocal about working to get more eyes on dual meets (which made huge strides forward last season thanks to Kyle Sockwell’s efforts, among others’), especially for those teams that don’t have real NCAA Championship hosts for most of their teams.
- To their credit, most of the more-vocal mid-major coaches are the coaches who are investing a ton of personal energy into generating more exposure for their teams and their programs, so they are ‘walking the walk.’ Some of that energy from the mid-major level could be a good addition to the ivory towers of the biggest programs, if it can be worked out the right way.
- One Power 5 associate head coach talked about athlete stories being important because that can gain a lot of exposure and those individual stories can generate a lot of interest. That associate head coach, ironically, comes from a program that has historically not been very media friendly – though that may not be a culture that the associate head coach has set.
- There seemed to be widespread agreement that the sport “fumbled” on telling the story of Gretchen Walsh and using it as a springboard for growth (ala Caitlin Clark).
- The CSCAA is going to talk to ESPN about whether they find more value in the individual successes or the team successes, so that the sport has some guidance on where to focus energy.
- Diving continues to ask for more exposure, plus platform and team diving events. The message back is that ESPN is currently less interested in diving than it is swimming.
- One head coach of a top 10 program brought up the idea of going to 12 athlete teams for championship meets. With roster limits and increasingly-imbalanced resources among programs, this could create more parity among the less-endowed teams that aren’t able to compete with the 22-deep squads at places like Texas.
Can someone ELI5 the automatic qualifier thing? I read that and immediately thought that already existed with A cuts, but that’s clearly not what this means. How would that work?
I think the Mid Major Auto Qualifier could definitely bring a lot more eyes to the meet, not just teammates, but parents, administrators, professors, and presidents would tune in to watch this if their school had someone competing. Not sure that is enough to completely move the needle where we want, but it could help. If you apply the following criteria, must make the NCAA B cut and win your conference meet in that event, it does not end up being a huge number of athletes. In a quick look at the women’s 50 free, there are 16 women’s mid major conferences. Three conferences had their event winner already make the meet and 4 conferences their champion did not make… Read more »
I think the challenge is how do you get a few mid-majors in without flooding with mid-majors.
Adding 10 mid-majors who are going to finish 47-56th in the 500 free really won’t do much to change the marketability. I’d rather see it happen in a way that encourages more development at the mid-major level.
I proposed this previously – but maybe this concept could be worked similarly to the one I discussed of a separate mid-major qualifying event. Like put them all together and have them battle for spots at NCAAs. That would be a marketable event, and would stimulate improvement in the mid-major programs, IMO.
The mid-major thing works in basketball because in basketball “any given Sunday.” In swimming,… Read more »
Not media friendly according to whom?
This is the kind of defense that an un-media friendly program would make. Gotta release a little control sometimes, coach.
Any more insight on how it would work to have automatic NCAA qualifiers for mid-major programs? Not sure if that would happen but I agree it would be good to have a legit “B” championship for D1. There is such a huge chasm between what D1 and DIII NCAAs it would be nice to give more mid-major swimmers a chance at a meaningful national championship meet. I know there is the NIC but as another person commented that doesn’t seem to have gotten traction.
Don’t schedule Swim Championships against March Madness weekends! Create “March Mayhem” and put the women the first weekend of March and men the second weekend.
It would have to be pushed back into April, since there’s also conference basketball championships around the time you’re suggesting.
April is a dead period on the college calendar – it would make the most sense
A 12 athlete team would absolutely destroy distance swimming in the US.
100% !
Here are 2 things that could help off set that a little:
Add the 1000 Free to NCAA championships.
Add 8 extra scoring positions to the distance events (1000 Free and 1650 Free – any other events for distance?), so that these events score Top 24 instead of Top 16 (36, 32, 29, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 20, 18, 16, 15……..). Not qualifying positions, but scoring positions.
For the 2025 NCAA Men’s championships, there were 5 schools that had more than 12 qualifiers.
For the 2025 NCAA Women’s championships, there were 5 schools that had more than 12 qualifiers.
Very good point!
Wait wut – we need to do mid-major auto-qualifiers so that an ncaa SWIM TEAM will watch their teammate at NCAAs? (a) adding 25 viewers doesn’t exactly move the needle, (b) it’s sad that actual college swimmers will only watch NCAAs if they have a teammate competing
We are literally around the sport day in and day out, we wake up at the a$$ crack of dawn only to return and leave the pool as the sun sets. The LAST thing any of us want to watch is a swim meet, ESPECIALLY if our teammates aren’t in it.
You clearly swam to be on a team and make friends which is cool, but some of us love just the art swimming no matter who is doing it.
I think that sounds more like a problem of a team who aren’t passionate about the sport…
I never made NCAA’s but I would watch it closely no matter what. I used it as an opportunity to watch the best and learn what they’re doing to help improve my own stroke. Plus to watch some insane, out-of-this-world, mentally unfathomable times.
I lived the life also. I get your point to a degree.
But late March is a relatively chill period for a college swimmer who’s not at NCAAs. I can guarantee you that if I had the ability to put on a livestream in my dorm room on a Friday evening to watch Marchand or Crooks or Gretchen Walsh make history — I would have have do so.
I hate the idea of auto-qualifiers. I get that it brings in more variety and incentivizes swimmers to go outside the P4, but auto-qualifiers would take 1/4 to 1/3 of the spots while most would have no chance at finaling.
Auto-qualifiers are a part of most all other sports. Mid major ADs knowing their swimming & diving program has a shot for consistent representation at the NCAA meet makes swimming a more valuable sport to keep in the portfolio.
As a fan I think they need to do a better job of balancing the schedule at NCAA championships. Day 1 is really awkward with the two separate streams and the ~ 30 minute break between the 200 medley and 800 free relays, and day 4 is too long.
The obvious change would be to move the 1650 free to day 1 between the two relays, but its probably not fair to have the 1650 free right before the 800 free relay because you’re gonna have overlap between the two events. So maybe swap the 800 free relay with one of the relays on day 2, 3, or 4?
From a swimmer’s perspective its nice having the 800 free relay on its own so you don’t go into the event tired. However, I agree a 30 minute break between the 2 relays is silly. Not many swimmers are doing both.
The obvious change would be to go to the D2 format, as that spreads everything out more while giving the distance swimmers more value