Which Swimmers Is Texas Taking to the Men’s SEC Championships (Roster Cuts Editorial)

As we move into the thick of conference championship week, there is a palpable funk in the air.

On the one hand, we will see fast swimming, dramatic turns, history being made, and records broken over the next 12 days. This will head into what will be one of the most spectacular Marches of college swimming we’ve ever seen. Gretchen Walsh is going to blow our minds, and the men’s meet is set up to be one of the best team battles we’ve ever had.

On the other hand, this will mark the beginning of one of the darkest marches in college swimming history, with hundreds or even thousands of athletes being cut from rosters to comply with the terms of the House vs. NCAA settlement, which has set swimming & diving roster caps at 30 men and 30 women.

The consequences will be far-reaching, and I don’t think most folks in the sport have begun to grapple with them yet. When the portal opens (on March 12 for D1 women, on March 19 for D1 men), the flood of talent will be unlike anything we’ve seen before.

I suspect that swimming hypeman Kyle Sockwell has it right when he proposes that there will be a multi-cycle approach to this: teams will make roster cuts, those swimmers will go into the portal, then those same teams will see who is available in the portal, and if they sign them, resulting in another (smaller) round of cuts and entries into the portal. Even schools that aren’t impacted by the roster limits (D2 and D3, for example), will have to make hard choices when there are opportunities to enhance their rosters.

Teams have already begun this cycle of roster cuts – though not many of those have received waivers to enter the portal yet, and with the ongoing D1 recruiting shutdown, other programs wouldn’t be able to contact them now anyway.

The SEC is going to be hit even harder, with the conference currently planning to reduce that roster cap further to 22, even though the House settlement isn’t going to make them.

Among the most-uniquely positioned of the programs in this scenario are the Texas Longhorns, who are the only SEC program this season that is likely to run into a “more NCAA qualifiers than we’re allowed to take” situation.

The proposed SEC cap of 22 athletes, with swimmers and divers each counting as one, matches the SEC’s conference championship roster limit (which is probably not a coincidence).

Who is In and Who is Out for Texas?

Reports out of Austin are that the Longhorns have had a multi-stage process for making cuts that has been transparent and, where possible, objective.

The athletes were ranked, and swimmers near the bottom of that ranking were shaved-and-tapered for spring meets, having certain targets that they needed to hit in order to continue in the process.

While we don’t know exactly who has, and has not, been cut from the Texas program, on the initial version of the SEC Championship psych sheets, Texas listed 26 athletes – and they will have until Monday evening to reduce their roster for SECs down to 22.

Texas In vs. Out at the SEC Championships

When looking through the list, a few things jump out:

Graduations vs. Commitments

The Texas men have 5 swimmers graduating after this season (remember that 2025 seniors don’t get a 5th year – unless they’re redshirt seniors).

They have at least 6 men committed for next season (Aiden Hammer, Campbell McKean, Calvin Fry, Rafael Fente-Damers, Kacper Masiuk, and a diver). And remember that the five swimmers all committed to Bowman after the Longhorns basically erased the previous commitments to the program.

If you add that math up, that means that at least three underclassmen from the left column can’t return on the varsity roster next season.

Who’s on the right side?

Among the swimmers in the right column are Russian Sasha Lyubavskiy, who went 14:59 in the mile at the Eddie Reese Showdown in late January

Another is Michael Cotter, the #3 recruit in the high school class of 2022 who transferred in from NC State this season and swam 1:34.16 in the 200 free mid-season. There are in fact two 1:34s in that right column: also on the right side is South African Kobe Ndebale, who had a breakthrough year swimming best times of 19.59/42.87/1:34.40 in the 50/100/200 freestyles this season.

Swimmers like Ndebale, with five or six semesters of college under their belts, are left with a tough choice on whether to transfer or whether to stay out their time with their current teams and graduate. Transferring that late into an academic career almost always results in setbacks, though they could graduate and transfer as a graduate student thereafter.

At least one swimmer in the right column, Andrew Zettle, hasn’t raced this semester after swimming only two events (the 50 free and a 200 free relay) at the Texas Hall of Fame Invitational.

Highly-recruited freshman Kyle Peck, the #11 recruit in the class, came alive at the Eddie Reese Showdown and swam a new best time of 45.02 in the 100 back, which was .75 seconds better than he was mid-season (and .66 seconds better than he was in high school). Now he’s on the SEC Championship roster and has a time that is likely to earn him an NCAA invite.

To be perfectly clear: we don’t know for sure who is being cut and who isn’t. Some of our readers know for sure who is being cut and who isn’t. But these are the hard looks that coaches across the country – even those not directly impacted by this – are going to have to make as they look to improve their teams. For some coaches it will be a choice between a non-conference swimmer with good grades and a non-conference swimmer with bad grades. For others, hard choices will have to be made between swimmers who scored points at conference meets.

Other fallout will include the loss of diving programs, which seems inevitable when swimmers and divers are weighed on the same scale and the swim coaches have final decision making authority; and the inevitable public meltdowns that are going to happen in the comments and social media from swimmers and parents who aren’t happy with being cut.

The times will be trying, the conflict in a sport that is already seeing historic highs of strife will only rise further. We all have to remember that to some extent, this is out of all of our control. The key to getting through it together, as a community, is going to be transparency, honesty, and communication.