Who Returns the Most Points from the 2025 Women’s NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships?

2025 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships

• March 19-22, 2025
• Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatics Center – Federal Way, Washington
• Short Course Yards (25 yards)
• Final Results
• Live Recaps :Day 1 ׀ Day 2 ׀ Day 3 ׀ Day 4
• Women’s NCAA Championship box score

Andrew Mering crunched most of the math for this article.

A note about the class data: the math is calculated based on what classes athletes were listed in on the official NCAA results file, and for returning points were adjusted where we were able to identify swimmers who will be returning. For example, NCAA Champion on the 1-meter Chiara Pellacani was listed as a senior, but is actually a redshirt junior. There is a good argument to be made as to which class these athletes should be included in, but we just stuck with how they were listed on the results sheet for simplicity.

Known individual scorers who are transferring out, which so far are Bella Sims from Florida (34 points), Lucy Mehraban from Louisville (1 point), and McKenzie Miller from BYU (29 points), were also removed from their teams’ returning points.

In short: this data isn’t perfect, and by definition almost can’t be, but let us know if you think of anything else we may have glossed over that should be accounted for.

As we continue the post mortem of the 2024-2025 NCAA Swimming & Diving season, the next thing we wanted to look at was scoring by each class.

Unsurprisingly, scoring is heavily slanted toward the older classes, with 1,069 out of the 2,480 individual points at the meet (43.1%) being scored by the senior and 5th year classes, the vast majority of whom have exhausted their NCAA eligibility.

This was the last season for swimmers to use a 5th year of eligibility unless they were granted a redshirt season in one of the last four and competed in the 2020-2021 collegiate season.

Points scored by class:

• Freshman – 426
• Sophomore – 464
• Junior – 521
• Senior – 721.5
• 5th year – 347.5

This ratio is actually a little lower than last year’s NCAA Championship meet, which was also heavily influenced by 5th years, but higher than 2023. Last year, 46.3% of points came from seniors and 5th years, while in 2023 that number was 39%.

Interestingly, the top three teams at the championships graduate a lower percentage of their points than the national average, in spite of losing high-profile names like Gretchen Walsh (Virginia), Alex Walsh (Virginia), and Emma Sticklen (Texas).

High-placing teams that were hit hard by graduations include #4 Indiana (losing 66% of their individual points), #8 Cal (losing more than 76% of their individual points), and #16 Georgia (losing 91% of their individual points).

Of course this is only part of the story. Incoming transfers, incoming freshmen, hitting tapers, and athlete development tell a lot of the story as well.

But while only part of the story, it does still tell some very important stories.

• The Virginia women’s “big three” of Gretchen Walsh, Alex Walsh, and Kate Douglass will all be gone next season, ending the era that built a dynasty. And yet, they still have the most returning points, thanks in large part to depth. They also return a bona fide pair of international swimmers in Claire Curzan (57 points) and Katie Grimes (34 points), plus a World Championship medalist in Leah Hayes (23 points). So while they don’t have the cheat codes that have carried them to record-after-record in the past, and it seems unlikely that they’re going to get faster in the relays, there are still plenty of names here. That, plus a really good incoming class (and rumors of internationals yet-to-be-named) means the Cavaliers remain as favorites for title number 6, even if next season is going to look a bit different.
• The top three teams Virginia, Stanford, and Texas, in spite of high profile graduations from two of them (Walsh sisters at Virginia, Emma Sticklen from Texas), return an overwhelming number of individual swimming points relative to the rest of the country. While Indiana was whacked by graduations, don’t miss out on them – they get Macky Hodges and Alex Shackell coming in next season, among others, as well as the #2 diver in the class (#1 is going to Stanford).
• While Bella Sims‘ transition to collegiate swimming has been far-from-perfect, she still scored 34 individual points at NCAAs last year and accounted for almost half of the team’s individual points from underclassmen. The Gators have a really good class coming in for the fall, maybe the best in the country if we limit the ranking to just Americans, and they’ll be counted on to contribute quickly.
• Michigan had a quiet rise to 9th place in the standings at the NCAA Championships and they return over 80% of their individual points. If they can get American recruits to take notice of their progress (they’re bringing in a European Junior Champion sprinter from Germany), this could be the next program to bounce toward that top 5.

Returning Points