In three days of the NCAA transfer portal being open for women’s swimming, the rush of names in hasn’t been as high as expected.
This is one of a few themes that have been on the chatter-wheel this week regarding the House settlement and roster impacts.
If you’re not an insider, here’s what coaches are saying to us:
Not that many women have entered the portal
Many coaches are saying that they are unsurprised by the fact that relatively-few women have entered the portal so far. One Power 5 coach said they expected about half of the swimmers they cut to go into the portal.
Multiple coaches have said that they are expecting another wave to go in post-NCAAs, which is normal, but might be bigger this year and include swimmers who have already been cut. One coach described this as them not wanting to distract their teams, though it would put them a couple of weeks behind in the new-look transfer cycle which will feel more like a recruiting cycle than maybe past transfer cycles have.
One point that has been brought up a few times to me is that many of the swimmers who were cut are in a situation where their progression in college has been limited, which is probably part of the reason why they were cut. If a swimmer hasn’t seen a progression in college swimming, they might be more primed to exit-right and just carry forward as a non-athlete student, explaining why many haven’t entered the portal.
Since March 11, 16L9 women have entered the portal.
Men Already Reaching Out
While the men’s portal doesn’t open until next Wednesday (a week after NCAA invites have announced), male swimmers who were cut have already begun reaching out to programs and asking coaches and other programs to ‘keep an eye out’ for them in the portal. For comparison, 123 women entered the portal in March 2023. So it’s more, it’s just not a deluge.
Another Wave of Cuts Might Be Coming
Multiple Power 4 programs have told athletes to expect more cuts in the fall of next year. These cuts could be in different forms – either a full release from the team, or some kind of a pseudo junior varsity/high performance club situation as was outlined here.
SwimSwam has heard from high school coaches that this high performance center idea is being talked about in recruiting, so there seems to be real momentum behind it.
The unintended consequence of this “cut in the fall” could be…
A Much Later Start to the 2025-2026 Season
Multiple programs have said that their current guidance is that they can sort of carry as many swimmers as they want and then just have to declare their 30 or 22 or whatever their number is before their first meet.
The unintended consequence of this is that teams are planning to push the start of their competitive varsity season back until November so that they can gather as much information as possible before having to make those decisions.
I think a more compact varsity season could be a good thing, and while in the short-term it might further undermine the importance of the “dual meet,” in the long run I think could lead to a more coherent and digestible collegiate swimming season.
Coaches Are Willing to Give Grace, But Are Asking For It Too
Several coaches have discussed with SwimSwam the way that this scenario is a double-edged sword.
Athletes are feeling the pressure and almost a degree of shame for entering the portal or being cut, relying on the old context for those things. But as one SwimSwam commenter put it, coaches aren’t viewing this as a “scarlet letter” and don’t think that anybody else should either, because they fully understand the nature of what’s happening and are willing to accept the nature of the circumstances.
By the same token, coaches have told SwimSwam that they’re hoping for more grace and understanding from the athletes as well, because the roster cuts (and more specifically the hurried nature of them having to be shrunk before next season) wasn’t necessarily their choice.
The world is evolving, and the paradigms will have to shift.
SwimSwam has heard from coaches and athletes (and athletes’ parents) on this topic – as outlined partially in this article. And the theme seems to be that everyone is afraid that the other side won’t understand why they did what they did.
One Program Cutting Way Back
One Power 4 program that is not in the SEC is rumored to have been told by their athletics department to reduce the roster to 15 men and 24 women.
It’s unclear if that is a hard cap or a soft target like we saw Virginia set for themselves internally, but it seems that a growing number of schools are going below the House-defined roster limits as they try and cope with their new financial realities, which again will further distance the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ from what we already see in college swimming.
The Expectations are Shifting, the Bar Is Lifting
And finally, with more compact rosters come deeper decisions from coaches. A 52-second butterflier in the transfer portal previously would have been contacted by just about every major program. Whereas previously the resource that was being managed was “scholarships,” now coaches are managing scholarships, AND roster spots, AND NIL money.
Recruiting got a lot more complex, so previous “no duh” recruitments will now include longer conversations about “do we really need a butterflier there, or should we hold out for a breaststroker?”
This will shift recruiting and make it more similar, in some ways, to other NCAA team sports. Not that this thinking was totally devoid in previous recruiting cycles, but now it’s going to really be accentuated.
One former Power 5 coach told me that their AD once told them to run an ad in the newspaper to find more swimmers to expand their roster and hit some Title IX balancing number. Those days seem long gone now.
16L9 women?
Sounds like a big mess!