New College Swimming League dives into inaugural season with eye on wider audience

Sept 23 : The new College Swimming League will launch its inaugural season on Thursday outside Chicago, seeking to give one of U.S. college sport's most successful but least visible disciplines a more prominent stage.

The league, built in less than a year, brings together 12 programs from the SEC, ACC and Big Ten, three of the leading regional conferences in U.S. college sport, for a fall series of team competitions that will be streamed on ESPN platforms in the United States and shown internationally on DAZN.

The opening match at FMC Natatorium in Westmont, Illinois, will feature Indiana, Louisville, Michigan and Ohio State. The eight-event season concludes with a championship in Indianapolis on Nov. 6.

College Swimming League CEO Rob Kent said the venture was a calculated gamble, drawing on lessons from the International Swimming League (ISL) while seeking to tap into the established fan bases of major universities.

"There's only really two ways to do it," Kent told Reuters. "You either ease your way into it or you swing for the fences. And guess which side we took."

LOOKING TO MAKE A SPLASH 

The competition will use a combined men's and women's team format, with four schools competing across 30 events in matches designed to last around two and a half hours. It will include spectator-friendly formats such as Skins, a multi-round elimination race, and a "jackpot" scoring rule that rewards dominant victories.

Organizers hope the league can create a more compelling product for broadcasters and fans during a part of the college swimming calendar that has traditionally received limited attention.

"We built it so that everybody here will go crazy, which looks really good on broadcast," Kent said, adding that the league was designed primarily with the television audience in mind.

The field includes swimmers from more than 35 countries, including Virginia's Italian backstroke specialist Sara Curtis, who set the women's 50 metres backstroke world record in August. Tennessee's Jillian Crooks of the Cayman Islands and Michigan's Stephanie Balduccini of Brazil, both two-time Olympians, are also scheduled to compete.

The league, which received funding from ISL founder and Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Grigorishin, will cover nearly $1 million in team travel costs and offer a $100,000 prize purse, with $25,000 going to each of the four schools that reach the championship. The money will go to athletic programs rather than directly to swimmers.

Kent said direct athlete compensation was an ambition for the future, but that the first priority was establishing a viable commercial platform for swimmers whose sport has lagged football and basketball in exposure and revenue.

"Student athletes that generate revenue should benefit," Kent said. "Swimming doesn't. So why don't we build something for them to do that? And here we are."

COO and co-founder Kyle Sockwell said the league could increase athletes' visibility and help create opportunities for name, image and likeness (NIL) deals.

"Your NIL just went from, for most of these swimmers, literally zero, to you might be able to get a sponsor because you're on a CSL team," Sockwell said.

The top three teams will qualify automatically for the championship, while teams ranked fourth through seventh will compete for the final berth in a Nov. 5 Wild Card meet in Indianapolis.