Where In The World Are The 2024 Men’s NCAA Qualifiers and Champions From?

2024 MEN’S NCAA SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• March 27-30, 2024
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The 2024 NCAA Championship season wrapped up on March 30th as the Arizona State men won their first team title in program history. But just because two weeks of electric action is over doesn’t mean we can’t still have fun looking back.

Shortly before NCAAs began, Chris Mann, tweeted at us with a breakdown of qualifiers for 2024 men’s NCAAs by state. More data kept following that included swimmers from international countries as well. But let’s start with the state-by-state breakdown.

Note: Includes only invited swimmers, no relay-only invites. Swimmers’ home states are separate from the country they represent internationally and are determined by what is listed on their program’s roster as of 3.25.24.

On the men’s side, Texas has the most NCAA qualifiers with 16 swimmers. The Lone Star state is followed by California, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina, which each have 12 swimmers in Indianapolis. This tracks with the latest membership numbers released by USA Swimming this week as these states are home to some of the most populous LSCs in the country.

There are 13 states–plus Washington D.C–that have no swimmers at men’s NCAAs.

But it’s not just about which state has the most swimmers. Nevada is only listed as three swimmers home state but two of them walked away with an individual NCAA title: Luke Hobson won the 200 free for the second straight year and Ilya Kharun claimed the 200 fly.

Other states with newly crowned individual NCAA champions include Georgia (Liam Bell, 100 breast), New Jersey (Destin Lasco 200 back/200 IM), and Pennsylvania (Brendan Burns, 100 back).

Of course, NCAA swimming isn’t just made up of Americans anymore. International swimmer participation has been growing steadily, especially in the last couple of seasons. That’s reflected in the non-U.S country-by-country breakdown. Swimmers from 32 countries outside of the U.S. participated at the 2024 Men’s Division I NCAAs.

Seven swimmers in Indianapolis call Canada home, which makes them the most well-represented non-U.S. country at the meet, just ahead of Germany and Israel (both with six). Brazil, Poland, Spain, and Turkey all had four swimmers.

Thanks in large part to Josh Liendo (50 free/100 free/100 fly) and Leon Marchand (500 free/200 breast/400 IM) both sweeping their individual events, international swimmers actually won more than half of the 13 individual events on offer in the NCAA format. With Hungary’s Zalan Sarkany winning the 1650 freestyle, the three international swimmers combined for seven titles.

And just for fun, given all the medal table talk we’ve had for the last nine months, here’s what a medal table looks like for NCAAs (again based on swimmers’ hometowns, not by the country they represent).

NCAAs Medal Table By Hometown (Individual Events Only)

Note: The NCAA podium is eight places; first through eighth earn both a trophy and All-American status. So, the medal table is a little bigger than usual.

This list changes if you swap it to countries that the swimmers represent internationally. The biggest difference would be Kharun, who is from Nevada but represents Canada internationally. Swapping the table would put Canada just one NCAA title away from a “tie” with the U.S. for most first-place finishes at the meet and would also give Canada a 4th place 100 fly finish. Other changes we’d see would be the addition of Great Britain (Jonny Marshall) and Uzbekistan (Ilia Sibirtsev) to the medal table.

At this meet, there were five events where half of the top eight were international swimmers (50 free, 100 fly, 200 free, 1650 free, 100 free). There were no championship finals that were a majority international swimmers.