By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
The impact of pending NCAA roster limitations are beginning to be felt in a big way. In the leadup to Wednesday’s national signing day, there was a slew of athletes being told that the promised spots on teams were no longer available.
The best analogy for what swimming is experiencing right now is college baseball. In baseball, athletes are commonly drafted out of high school amid a massive draft that runs 20 standard rounds plus a further five special rounds.
Unlike some sports, athletes can wait to see where they are drafted (and in fact don’t even need to declare for the draft if they’re from the U.S. or Canada) before deciding whether to jump straight to the minor leagues or to attend college.
This leaves a lot more uncertainty for coaches about who is actually going to show up on signing day and who will not.
Hard roster caps are exacerbating this problem in baseball, where the average roster size in the 2023-2024 season is 41.9 and where the hard cap will became 34 under the new arrangement.
Incidentally, baseball coaches are lamenting the new roster limits creating strain on their practice schedules. They say the new caps don’t leave teams with enough pitchers to run full practices, fearing it could lead to increased injuries.
While most athletics departments have given their swim coaches soft caps for the purposes of Title IX balancing, there is no more flexibility. These hard caps, and the possibility of decommits, will likely lead to either 1) over-offering, or 2) more cuts of existing swimmers when a potential freshman has more upside.
But more broadly, what we’re seeing is coaches who recruited their classes of 2025 when thinking they were limited by their internal soft caps, when in reality they’re being limited by the new proposed hard caps, which for swimming in the major conferences are likely to land at 30 women and 22-24 men per team. The men’s number, specifically, seems to fluctuate by the day, but most coaches’ most recent information has it in that range.
One SEC program reportedly pulled offers from five women last week – the gender with higher roster limits. Some of those swimmers have already recommitted elsewhere.
The emotional fallout of this is going to be significant. While many coaches from next-tier programs have been anxiously waiting to take advantage of these opportunities to improve their programs. Athletes who have told their friends, family, and the whole of the swimming community that they are going to swim at a big name-brand program X will now have to tell those same people that they are no longer going there. The lists we report of commitments to each program at the end of recruiting articles are now almost assuredly out-of-date.
But college athletics are now indisputably a business with indisputable business functions, and these are the inevitable consequences of the professionalization of the entire endeavor.
There is a pushback on this. Two college coaches have told SwimSwam that they have been told by recruits that their club coaches have recommended them to make a verbal commitment to a mid-major program to ‘hold a spot’ before continuing to push for placement on a Power 4 roster. This is a natural and opposing reaction to coaches making promises of roster spots to more athletes than they can accept – and hopefully a short-term correction as both sides adjust to the new rules and understand the new thresholds for athletes to earn spots on top 25 teams.
In the coming weeks, when stories shift from “commitments” to “decommitments” and “recommitments,” as a community we must show some grace. In many of these cases, the change of plans will not be driven by a change of heart, and to label these athletes as lacking some sort of integrity. The same is true of coaches: while they have known roster limits are coming for quite some time, ultimately I think they were left trying to figure out how those roster limits would actually shift the recruiting landscape and with deciding how they wanted to make those cuts.
I think things will balance out in a couple years as the new normal feels more normal, but it’s going to be an ugly few seasons in the meantime. We need to accept that on both sides, a lot of this is out of the control of anybody in swimming – but that as a sport, we can all continue to focus on the things that are within our control to create a healthier outlook for college swimming in the long-term.
We have to look at the opportunities, because the roster limits aren’t going away. Roster limits might mean more programs getting a chance to score more points at conference championship meets. They might mean shorter dual meets with fewer non-scoring heats. They might mean higher engagement from every member of a college swim team.
I am generally pessimistic about these changes being good for (or sustainable for) college athletics in the long run, but what I look to as a source of optimism is this: everyone has hated the way NIL and the transfer portal has impacted college football, and yet, college football television ratings continue to rise.
Maybe this is the kick-in-the-butt that swimming, a famously hard-to-move sport, needs to ignite some positive changes.
College football got there by being open and honest about the new world. Communicating with peers, communicating with coaches, communicating with athletes, communicating with the general public – those are things that football has done pretty well on their road to understanding their new world.
Can swimming do the same? What makes the whole thing feel nefarious is the operation in secret, behind closed doors, with everyone pretending like swimming is somehow ‘above all that,’ when in reality, we are now living in that same world. It’s time to pull back the curtain so that everyone understands what is happening and can react accordingly.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: 2025 Recruits Are Being Hit Hard By New NCAA Swimming Roster Limits