By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
Fresno State and Rice joined Northwestern in having their travel to this week’s NCAA Swimming & Diving Championship meet disrupted.
Fresno State Gets Canceled, then Rerouted
Fresno State had perhaps the worst travel story of any team on the way to the meet. Their original flight on Monday scheduled to go from Fresno to Dallas to Atlanta. Then, after switching flights and flying from Fresno to Salt Lake City, their flight onward to Atlanta was canceled.
The team then slept in SLC that night, got on a last minute flight from SLC to Denver; then a flight from Denver to Birmingham, Alabama; then they took the 2.5 hour drive from Birmingham to Atlanta. They arrived on Tuesday, the day before the meet, at 4:45PM.
While people often fly into Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and drive to Birmingham, the trip rarely happens the other way around. Hartsfield-Jackson, the busiest airport in the world by passengers served, sees over 100 million flyers annually. Birmingham, by comparison, served roughly 3.3 passengers in 2025.
Fresno State has two swimmers, both breaststrokers, qualified to the meet individually: senior Aliz Kalmar and senior Mackenzie Lung. Lung wa the #8 seed in the 100 and the #10 seed in the 200, while Kalmar is the #36 seed in the 100 and #27 seed in the 200.
In prelims of the 100 breast, Lung finished 15th to score 2 points for the Bulldogs in 58.89. Kalmar finished 29th.
Fresno State also has senior platform diver Grace Ally qualified for the meet.
Rice Arrives Late Tuesday Night
Rice was able to take a direct flight from Houston to Atlanta, but with over a third of Atlanta’s TSA staff calling out for their shifts and over half of the TSA staff at Houston’s Hobby Airport calling out for their shifts, there were long delays.
While Hobby is the smaller of Houston’s two major commercial airports, it is still a major airport with north of 15 million passengers served annually. The situation at Houston’s other airport wasn’t any better, with reports of 2 hour lines at security check points.
Rice wound up arriving late Tuesday night, around 10PM, meaning their first swims in Atlanta were during warmups for the 1650 free.
Rice has two swimmers qualified for the meet individually. Sophomore Ava Portello was invited as an automatic qualifier in the 1650 free (#42 seed) and 500 free (#37 seed).
Daria Cole will swim the 400 IM (#46 seed) as an automatic qualifier as well.
In spite of the rough travel schedule, Portello swam 16:14.80 in the 1650 free early heats. That ranks her 16th with still the fastest seeds to go in finals. That time was a nine second improvement on the 16:23.84 that she swam at the AAC Championships.
Travel delays will be rampant in Atlanta over the next few weeks. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are working without pay due to a government funding impasse. More than a third of security screener’s at Atlanta’s major airport, a hub to Spring Break spots in the Southeast, didn’t show up to work on Tuesday. In Houston, another major hub, more than half of the employees didn’t show up for their shifts.
This is at least the third lapse in funding that has caused employees to miss pay in the last six months. In the prior two instances, employees eventually received back pay, but bills piled up in the mean time and many looked for work elsewhere.
Read more about absentee rates around the country here.The United States Congress, which funds the TSA, is gridlocked over a funding bill. A Republican-led version would fund all agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, including TSA, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Democratic leadership has put forward a bill that funds all parts of the DHS except ICE and CBP – namely the TSA, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Coast Guard.
The TSA and travel delays have become a common political football because of its wide-reaching impacts on the public, with both parties pointing fingers at the other for not passing the bill.
ICE and CBP activities have been under scrutiny by individuals on both sides of the aisle after Minneapolis became a flashpoint for clashes between ICE and protesters, with two U.S. citizens being killed there by federal agents. Democrats are demanding immigration reforms, while Republic leadership says that the Democratic version of the bill is an attempt to “defund the police” and “reopen our borders to illegal aliens.”
The men’s meet will be back in Atlanta next week.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Fresno State Faced Hellacious Four-Leg Journey to Atlanta; Rice Arrived Late Tuesday
Hence then, the article about fresno state faced hellacious four leg journey to atlanta rice arrived late tuesday was published today ( ) and is available on swimswam ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Fresno State Faced Hellacious Four-Leg Journey to Atlanta; Rice Arrived Late Tuesday )
Also on site :
- ‘There’s a fire simmering’: Molly Caudery on Paris Olympics ‘heartache’, Tokyo injury, and finding redemption
- Liverpool news: £60m summer transfer 'panic mode' as Saudi set for shocking swoop
- KRAFTON India Drops BGMI 4.3 Update – New UI, Game-Changing Collaborations, Card Collection System, and More