By Madeline Folsom on SwimSwam
Saint Mary’s College, a Division I school in the Bay Area, will be adding men’s and women’s swimming and water polo for the 2026-27 school year.
The new programs are expected to create opportunities for approximately 80 student athletes at launch, and are projected to expand to 100. The development of the program is “already underway – including the hiring of coaches, identifying training facilities, and recruiting student-athletes.”
The University will be offering athletic scholarships for both the swimming and water polo teams.
They will join the 18 other sports sponsored by the school. Swimming will compete in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, which has seen a lot of changes in the last few years, and will have seven new programs for the 2025-26 season.
Women’s Water Polo will compete in the Golden Coast Conference, competing with other California schools like Loyola Marymount and Fresno State. Men’s Water Polo will join the rest of the school’s athletics teams and compete in the West Coast Conference, which consists of other swimming schools Grand Canyon University and Seattle University.
Swimming and Water Polo are huge across the state of California and particularly in the Bay Area. They will join Stanford, Cal, San Jose State, and Cal State East Bay as schools with swimming programs in the area.
The Bay is also home to major club teams such as Quicksilver Swimming, Santa Clara Swim Club, the Pleasanton Seahawks. Currently the area is home to superstar club swimmers like Luka Mijatovic and Mikayla Tan.
This addition comes at a time when many schools are cutting their swimming programs. We recently saw Cal Poly, another California school, cut both their men’s and women’s programs.
The addition of water polo is also significant. There are currently only 27 division I schools that sponsor men’s water polo and 36 schools that sponsor women’s polo. Most of these programs are in California with 83 of 122 total colleges that offer water polo existing in the state. Of those schools, 45 are not four-year schools and are community colleges which only offer two years of school and eligibility.
President Roger Thompson addressed this landscape, saying “While many NCAA institutions across the country are scaling back athletics, Saint Mary’s is making a bold commitment to expand opportunities for students.”
He told SwimSwam that he loves watching the Olympics and he is “proud” of what the United States has done, particularly in the pool, and he wants Saint Mary’s to be able to contribute to that success and legacy.
When the program starts, the athletes will train and compete at the nearby Campolindo High School, which is home to the Soda Aquatic Center, an Olympic-size pool. The school is aiming to build a state-of-the-art facility in the coming years with support from donors, alumni, and friends, along with “aquatics enthusiasts”.
Their goal with a new facility would be to not only provide pool space to the University programs, but at times when the varsity teams are not using the facilities, open them up to club teams of both swimming and water polo as well as competitions to give back to the community.
The school’s first goal is to hire head coaches for the programs with position postings going live on September 15. Saint Mary’s Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics, Mike Matoso said “We are committed to hiring coaches who not only bring a track record of competitive success, but who also embody the values that make Saint Mary’s unique.”
President Thompson took over the role of President on July 22, 2024, and he is largely responsible for the idea behind creating the program. He said that when he moved to the East Bay last summer, he went to the grocery store, and ran into a woman with bottles of water and ice for her child’s swim team. When he looked around the parking lot, he saw a large number of cars with some kind of swimming or water polo iconography, and he realized he moved to a “hotbed” of aquatics in the country. “When you are sitting in the east Bay of California, you are in the heart of swimming and water polo.”
Last year, they began exploring aquatics, and speaking to experts to determine what the process of creating aquatics programs at the University would look like. Thompson said he believes “there are a lot of kids in California that would want to continue their swimming and water polo careers, and I want Saint Mary’s to be an option.”
Leaders at USA Swimming, such as Joel Shinofield the Managing Director of Sport Development, and USA Water Polo, like CEO Jamie Davis, helped advise the University of the best steps to move forward with the program. President Thompson said he was “deeply appreciative” to them and to people who care about the future of the sport. “This is an opportunity to be impactful, and at a time when programs are being cut, I want us to be contrarian.”
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