By Madeline Folsom on SwimSwam
We are less than a week away from the start of September, and after months of major international meets, we are ready to return to NCAA Swimming & Diving with the start of the 2025-2026 season just around the corner. The 2025 recruits, and transfers, have made their decisions for where they will spend their year and will be starting classes over the next month.
At SwimSwam, the smell of college swimming in the air means that we have been working through the top recruits, the top recruiting classes and last season’s top 12 programs for both genders. As we post articles, we will update our compendium (as Mark coined it last year) so you can quickly and easily access everything.
Top 12 Programs Preview
Women’s Top 12 Men’s Top 12 Program 2025 NCAA Score Stars (★) Program 2025 NCAA Score Stars (★) Virginia 544 1 Texas 490 Stanford 417 2 California 471 Texas 394 3 Indiana 459 Indiana 312 4 Florida 315 Tennessee 298 5 Tennessee 266.5 Florida 232 6 Arizona State 248 Louisville 209.5 7 Georgia 238.5 California 202.5 8 Stanford 216 Michigan 196 9 NC State 178 NC State 164 10 Virginia Tech 107.5 Southern California 130 11 Michigan 98.5 Wisconsin 126 12 Texas A&M 95.5GRADING CRITERIA
Over the years, we’ve gone back and forth on how to project points, ranging from largely subjective rankings to more data-based grading criteria based on ‘projected returning points.’ We like being as objective as possible, but we’re going to stick with the approach we’ve adopted post-Covid. The “stars” will rely heavily on what swimmers actually did last year, but we’ll also give credit to returning swimmers or freshmen who have posted times that would have scored last year.
Since we only profile the top 12 teams in this format, our grades are designed with that range in mind. In the grand scheme of college swimming and compared to all other college programs, top 12 NCAA programs would pretty much all grade well across the board. But in the interest of making these previews informative, our grading scale is tough – designed to show the tiers between the good stroke groups, the great ones, and the 2015 Texas fly group types.
5 star (★★★★★) – a rare, elite NCAA group projected to score 25+ points per event 4 star (★★★★) – a very, very good NCAA group projected to score 15-24 points per event 3 star (★★★) – a good NCAA group projected to score 5-14 points per event 2 star (★★) – a solid NCAA group projected to score 1-4 points per event 1 star (★) – an NCAA group that is projected to score no points per event, though that doesn’t mean it’s without potential scorers – they’ll just need to leapfrog some swimmers ahead of them to do itWe’ll grade each event discipline: sprint free (which we define to include all the relay-distance freestyle events, so 50, 100 and 200), distance free, IM, breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly and diving. Use these grades as a jumping-off point for discussion, rather than a reason to be angry.
Also, keep in mind that we are publishing many of these previews before teams have posted finalized rosters. We’re making our assessments based on the best information we have available at the time of publication, but we reserve the right to make changes after publication based on any new information that may emerge regarding rosters. If that does happen, we’ll make certain to note the change.
Top Recruiting Classes
Women’s Programs Men’s Programs 1-4 5-8 9-12 13-16 Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)A few important notes on our rankings:
The rankings listed are based on our Class of 2025 Re-Rank. “HM” refers to our honorable mentions and “BOTR” refers to our Best of the Rest section for top-tier recruits. Like most of our rankings, these placements are subjective. We base our team ranks on a number of factors: prospects’ incoming times are by far the main factor, but we also consider potential upside in the class, class size, relay impact, and team needs. Greater weight is placed on known success in short course yards, so foreign swimmers are slightly devalued based on the difficulty in converting long course times to short course production. Transfers are included, though they are weighed less than recruits who arrive with four seasons of eligibility. For the full list of all verbally committed athletes, click here. A big thank you to SwimSwam’s own Anne Lepesant for compiling that index – without it, rankings like these would be far less comprehensive. Some teams had not released a finalized 2025-26 team roster at the time these articles were published, meaning it’s possible we missed some names. Let us know in the comments below.Individual Recruit Ranks
Girls
Ranks As Seniors (June 2025) Ranks As Juniors (from July 2024) Ranks As Sophomores (from April 2023)Boys
Ranks As Seniors (June 2025) Ranks As Juniors (from June 2024) Ranks As Sophomores (from June 2023)Read the full story on SwimSwam: 2025-2026 NCAA Division I College Preview Compendium
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