The UNC Men Are The Surprise Leaders Among the ACC Old Guard After 3 Days in Greebsoro

By Braden Keith on SwimSwam

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2025 ACC Swimming and Diving Championships

• February 18-22, 2025
• Greensboro Aquatic Center — Greensboro, North Carolina
• Full Event Schedule (pre-scratch timeline)
• Championship Central
• Psych Sheets
• Live Results
• Live Streaming
• Day 1 Finals Recap
• Day 2 Prelims Recap |Day 2 Finals Recap
• Day 3 Prelims Recap | Day 3 Finals Recap

Making the mythical a reality, former Pac-12 frontrunners Cal and Stanford have made their presence known. On the men’s side, Cal is in 1st place and Stanford is in 2nd place. On the women’s side, Stanford is in 2nd place behind Virginia, and Cal is in 4th place behind Louisville.

But this story isn’t about them.

This story is about the team that sits in third place in the men’s team. If you didn’t look, you might not guess that it was, in fact, the North Carolina men.

A good program with a good coach and a good history, UNC is not an obvious candidate for a Cinderella label. But the UNC men’s team finished 8th out of 11 teams at last year’s ACC Championships, and this year, if it weren’t for the presence of Cal and Stanford, might well be leading this year’s ACC Championship meet.

Without doing the math about “results removing Cal and Stanford,” at a minimum we can say that they are the current leaders among the ACC old-guard sitting 16 points ahead of the three-time defending champions NC State, a team that finished 461 points ahead of anyone in the ACC last year and 883.5 points ahead of UNC last year.

There’s lots of caveats going on here, like the presence of Cal and Stanford, and the absence of last year’s runners-up from Notre Dame on a suspension year.

But this is a huge turnaround for a UNC program that was left thin last year after some high profile transfers in the few seasons prior like Dylan Citta (UNCW), Nick Radkov (Virginia), and Aidan Crisci (Tennessee).

There are some bright spots coming in next season with a very good recruiting class next season, including Granger Bartee, who was ranked #18 in the high school class of 2025 before his junior season.

But they are way ahead of schedule with their performance through three days at the ACC Championships.

Their divers are a big part of that story. Rodolfo Vazquez led the team through two days with 49 points and Christopher Booler was not far behind with 44 points on the springboard events. Many of the league front-runners don’t have great diving, and nobody in the league has diving depth as good as UNC’s (they had a freshman and two sophomores of top 8 on 1-meter), but that’s not the entirety of the story.

PJ Foy finished 7th in the 50 free in 19.18 after going 19.21 in the morning to take down the school record that had stood since 2012, and he’s only a freshman. He was a 19.73 before arriving in Chapel Hill, so he was a very good sprint prospect, but again, his adjustment to college has been ahead-of-schedule; his teammate and fellow freshman Martin Kartavi broke Foy’s school record when he won the B-Final in 19.12, leaving them among the top freshman sprinters in the country this season.

Veterans have stepped up this season too. Patrick Hussey, a middle-distance swimmer, split 18.87 on a UNC 200 free relay, for example, before going on to finish 2nd in the 200 free in 1:31.68. Sophomore Ben Delmar finished 3rd in the 400 IM after placing 10th at last year’s meet. Junior Louis Dramm finished 4th in the 200 IM a year after finishing 10th.

This is year one of what looks to be a bright future for the Tar Heel men. It is a team that is built to perform well at a conference meet – they don’t have the top-end scorers to keep pace with a squad like NC State or probably even Virginia Tech at NCAAs. With only one platform diver Carter Loftin in the last two days of competition, the weight of the boards will diminish a little in the team scoring over the next two days, which benefits teams like NC State more.

But conference championship success is always the canary in the coalmine. Arizona State won their first-ever Pac-12 Championship in 2023 before winning their first-ever NCAA Championship in 2024, for example.

And while the presence of Cal and Stanford is real, meaning UNC is not going to win the meet, this come-up for the head coach Mark Gangloff’s squad is too good to ignore.

Team Standings After Day 3:

1. Cal – 633.5
2. Stanford – 565
3. UNC – 517
4. NC State – 501
5. Louisville – 449.5
6. VA Tech – 331
7. UVA – 306
8. Florida State – 305.5
9. Pitt – 255.5
10. SMU – 239
11. Georgia Tech – 233
12. Duke – 105
13. Boston College – 62
14. Miami – 52
15. Notre Dame – 19

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