By Yanyan Li on SwimSwam
Passionate is an understatement when describing Arizona State information systems professor Matthew McCarthy‘s feelings on women’s and non-revenue sports.
McCarthy goes on fervent rants about conference realignment and the way female athletes were “screwed over” by the additional travel it caused. Astounded by the low attendance at a Sun Devil volleyball game in 2003, he started offering extra credit to students in his Computer Information Systems (CIS) 105 class for going to select non-football sporting events at ASU. He wasn’t super familiar with the ASU swimming and diving team before this year but knew of its success, and once again, that feeling of injustice ensued.
“They were national champions. I’m like, how the hell are you only getting 50 people to show up to this s—t?” McCarthy said.
The result of these emotions was 2,867 people flooding the stands of the Mona Plummer Aquatic Center on Oct. 3 for Arizona State’s home opener against the University of Nevada, Las Vegas – a number well beyond the Sun Devils’ typical attendance figures. The venue was so full that fans were watching from the parking lot by the pool.
Reminiscing on Friday’s meet
Thank you to everyone who came out and supported us in our season opener! #ForksUp /// #O2V pic.twitter.com/HNCjuLvQjZ
— Sun Devil Swim/Dive (@ASUSwimDive) October 6, 2025
McCarthy CIS 105 class, which comprises of nearly 4,000 first-year students during the fall semester, has been blowing up the attendance for sports like volleyball, water polo, women’s soccer and men’s tennis across the past 22 years for academic incentive. With the help of ASU Swim and Dive head coach Herbie Behm and weeks of social media promotion, the class translated its efforts from the land to the water.
The Sun Devils dominated the Oct. 3 meet, with the men beating the Rebels 236-60 while the women won 242-57. ASU junior Ilya Kharun shined with a 100/200 butterfly sweep. The main story, however, was the competition’s spectacle that made waves across the swimming community, ASU athletics and local news outlets.
“I was really happy that they delivered,” Behm said of the ASU fans at his meet. “We were hyping it up to people being like, ‘You’ve got to come. It’s going to be the biggest dual meet ever.'”
Driving up engagement
Organizing the Oct. 3 dual meet first began during the summer, when McCarthy emailed Behm. McCarthy has received varied levels of enthusiasm from the ASU coaches he’s interacted with, but Behm — who the professor now considers as the ASU coach he knows best — was beyond willing to cooperate.
“He’s been doing this for a long time, and it’s something that he took a lot of pride in,” Behm said of McCarthy’s initiative. “So I was like, ‘what do you need to make this the biggest thing possible?'”
Behm compares the average dual meet to an NFL game with no concessions, announcer or scoreboard. He’s never been a fan of changing the lineup of an official competition through including non-traditional events (ex. skins races), but was determined to make the atmosphere supplementing the races more entertaining.
It first started with promoting the meet as early as Aug. 20, when McCarthy called it a “CIS 105 Beach Party” on his Instagram. Between then and Oct. 3, a combined 17 posts were made on Instagram between McCarthy and ASU (11 from McCarthy, six from ASU) about the event, including a promotional video that announced McCarthy as guest captain.
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McCarthy also advertised the event in his class. He wanted first-years to get out of their dorms and explore campus life, but also to realize that they were surrounded by extraordinary people in Tempe.
“‘That French kid, [Leon] Marchand, did you know that guy’s an Olympic gold medalist? Yeah, he’s the best athlete in the world,'” McCarthy recalled of what he told his students. “These people are among us, and they’re your peers.”
While McCarthy mobilized his students in class, Behm worked to bolster the product by the pool. With the help of the Arizona State swimming booster club, Behm installed a temporary beer garden by Mona Plummer (“I mean, who does that?” McCarthy said of the initiative). A play-by-play announcer and color commentator were recruited to provide context for a predominantly non-swim nerd audience. Behm invested in a setup to live stream the meet, which he said cost him under $400.
When the competition itself actually started, McCarthy’s students showed up in droves. Some of those students included Sun Devil enthusiasts with their chests painted in maroon and gold, and ASU spirit squad cheerleaders who showed up despite coming off travel commitments in other sports. They cheered for Professor McCarthy, who participated in the ASU tradition of stomping on a cardboard box. Behm described the crowd as electrifying for the most part, but when engagement did come to a lull, ASU initiated efforts like cap and t-shirt tosses or “the world’s biggest selfie” before the final relay to keep people on their feet.
For the swimmers themselves, Oct. 3 was the largest crowd they’ve competed under so far this season. Behm noticed that they swam considerably faster because of it.
“It sounds mystic, but there’s a physical reality. When there’s that many people there, you can feel,” Behm said. “It probably gave everybody another 2% in terms of the speed in which they swam. It was incredible.”
Maintaining growth
A week after the meet, the “Future Sun Devils” YouTube channel uploaded a news package on it, where some fans were interviewed about why they attended. All of them were McCarthy’s students, who said they were primarily motivated by the extra credit offered.
This raises the question — do large attendances like Oct. 3 actually grow the sport? Will all the people coming for academic incentive become interested in swimming? It’s a question that both Behm and McCarthy pondered, but both of them think the exposure in itself was worth it.
“If literally 3% of these people who are coming, the other 97% of them only care about the extra credit, but we get 50 new fans, that is an incredible win for the swimming community,” Behm said. “I’d say 99% of human society has not been to a swim meet. So if we can get a couple more there, then a couple of those ones that come back, that’s where we get it rolling.”
McCarthy encouraged his students to go to one additional meet after Oct. 3, ASU’s men’s-only dual against Southern California on Nov. 8. With the less-ideal timing of a Saturday morning, McCarthy approximates that only 300 to 400 people showed up.
However, McCarthy still gets messages on LinkedIn from former students, who remember hockey games he incentivized them to attend in 2005. An opposing men’s tennis coach once approached McCarthy to request he bring his students to their next competition in Tempe. McCarthy says he drives his teaching assistants crazy over the amount of photos they review — the professor only gives out credit to students who take a picture of the scoreboard at the start of a game they attend and a picture of it mid-game, to ensure that they actually watched the competition.
All this to say, McCarthy still has faith that he has made others care more about the sports he’s passionate over.
“It’s great when they show up and their bodies are painted. That’s what I want, right there,” McCarthy said. “Had you gone into the crowd, which was just raucous, I think you could have got a different opinion that a couple of people [in the parking lot] like ‘oh I really needed the extra credit.'”
In the meantime, the impact was clear throughout the ASU athletics department, where Behm became a standard-setter. Following the meet, coaches throughout the university asked him how they could replicate this type of attendance and hype at their own competitions.
McCarthy doesn’t plan to provide extra credit for any future competitions after this past semester, but the legacy of Oct. 3 will still live on. Behm wants to hype up future contests in the same way around once per semester, looking toward the Big 12 West Championship and future rivalry dual meets against teams like Arizona and California.
But most importantly, Behm wishes that others around the swimming community can be creative in the same way. Arizona State participated in November’s bracket-style CSCAA dual meet challenge, which he said had its pros and cons, but he appreciated the effort to think outside the box. He wants dual meet results to have implications for championship meets. He’s not opposed to the new changes to the NCAA Championships, but doesn’t think changing swimming’s whole identity is the way to draw new fans.
“We say Michael Phelps versus Mike Čavić, everybody knows what we’re talking about,” Behm said. “It wouldn’t have been necessarily more exciting if we made them stay up and race again, and race again. It was super exciting because there was buildup, and there was meaning to Michael Phelps and the stories that are connected to it.”
Behm looks toward college volleyball, a sport that got minuscule fan support at Arizona State when he was a student, but now sees seven-figure viewership numbers on national television. He hopes that college swimming, with its recent trend of innovation, can be where volleyball is 15 years from now.
But at the same time, swimming is going on its own path. Efforts like the Oct. 3 spectacle at Arizona State are just the start.
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