With most of the major international meets coming to a close, we are beginning to shift our focus to the upcoming NCAA season. Athletes have made their decisions for where they will spend the 2025-26 school year, and we have done our best to track it.
As always, we will be ranking the Top 16 recruiting classes for both men’s and women’s starting with #16 and moving to number one. We also have a few honorable mention teams before we get started
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.
Honorable Mentions
UCLA
With a very small class of three swimmers and one diver, UCLA earns a spot on our honorable mentions list due to the speed coming in from their recruits. 2025 HM Jada Duncan has been steadily improving and is coming into UCLA with sprint freestyle times of 22.14/48.71, and a 100 butterfly swim of 52.29, which is within 1% of the NCAA cutline. She will be a huge relay addition to the team, coming in with the fastest 50 freestyle time last season. Duncan will be joined by BOTR recruit Applejean Gwinn, whose IM strength will bolster an already strong IM program, and backstroker Erica Jaffe. The Bruins also picked up Italian diver Virginia Tiberti as a transfer from Tennessee.
Wisconsin
Wisconsin has some major ground to make up with the loss of Phoebe Bacon from their roster. They started the process with two BOTR recruits and a few transfers among their 12 person recruiting class. Andrea Dworak is a 200 and 500 freestyler with times of 1:46.5 and 4:46.5 which will help add points to the Badgers Big Ten roster along with breaststroker Brooke Corrigan, who has times of 1:00.3 and 2:11.6. Coming in as transfers from Indiana, but with four years of eligibility remaining since they didn’t compete, the Badgers will also have twins Lucie and Justine Delmas, who could bring speed to the butterfly and breaststroke events, respectively. Neither woman has swum a meet since March of 2024, which makes it hard to predict where they will be this season. There are also two divers coming in, Indiana transfer Julia Herring and freshman Zara Karimi, who will join a class of Sophia Brueggeman, Arianna Zelen, Lily Van Heel, Sarah Larsen, and Sarah Freeman.
South Carolina
The Gamecocks have nine swimmers coming in, including two BOTR recruits, and a few transfers. Molly Yacoviello was one of the BOTR recruits and she is a breaststroke and IMer who will be one of the top 200 breaststrokers on the team. The other is Tori Abruzzo, who is a backstroker and butterflyer who will help add depth to the team. They will be joined by transfers Samantha Chan, Kara West, and Taylor Grimley, as well as Sofia Luper, Kesa Taivassalo, and Alexis Dalton. The Gamecocks also picked up diving transfer Campbell Long from Auburn.
