The SwimSwam Podcast

Join Coleman Hodges as he goes event-by-event to preview the 2026 Men's DI NCAA Championships this week in Atlanta.

Join Coleman Hodges as he goes event-by-event to preview the 2026 Women's DI NCAA Championships this week in Atlanta.

Olivia Smoliga raced a LCM competition for the first time since the 2024 US Olympic Trials this past weekend in Westmont. Smoliga, 31, raced the 50 back (28.4) and 50 free (24.9), where she made the A-Final in both and placed 3rd in the latter. She also time trialed the 50 fly (26.9). The 2x Olympian gives her perspective on why she decided to return to racing, saying she feels like a whole new person now compared to when she was last competing. Smoliga hasn't been completely away from the pool, however. In the interim, she started In Depth Swim Academy, where she's been able to share...

Today on the GMM podcast we have Dan Meinholz, CEO of A3 Performance. For more than a decade A3 has been one of SwimSwam’s most consistent partners, and we’re especially grateful for their backing of our coverage of the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships. That kind of long-term support helps us keep doing what we do. But Dan’s connection to the sport runs a lot deeper than a business relationship. He’s deeply chlorinated. Dan grew up in the sport, built his career as a team dealer working directly with swim clubs, and eventually...

Mercersburg Academy had a big weekend at the 2026 Eastern Interscholastic Swimming & Diving Championships, winning the boys title and coming within striking distance of a combined team sweep after the girls finished 15.5 points short of the title. On the GMM Podcast, Head Coach Matt Hurst  breaks down the meet, his team's performance, and the culture that makes Mercersburg a consistent powerhouse in prep school swimming.

Coming into the B1G Championships, Indiana's Josh Bey was seeded at 3:42.61. Through prelims, he dropped a 3:36.92 PB. Then in finals, he cut another 2 seconds to touch at 3:34.90, touching .3 ahead of Michigan's Lorne Wigginton for the win. When SwimSwam sat down with Bey to discuss his monumental drop, he revealed an interesting development that occurred this season. At the beginning of the season, the 400 IM group had been doing a lot of over-distance training. When the group sat down with their coach, Luke Ryan, and asked to incorporate more race-specific work, Ryan agreed. This seemed to be a pivotal...

The 2026 NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Championships will very look different. The CSCAA’s proposed format changes have stirred debate across the sport, and veteran coach Brian Schrader has stepped forward publicly to say he does not support them.

Last week, 16-year-old phenom Luka Mijatovic turned heads with his historic performances at his CA sectionals. After clocking a 3:40 400 IM, he decimated his own 15-16 NAG in the 500 free with a 4:05.76, becoming the 3rd fastest performer in history. He followed that up with an American record in the 1000 free (8:32.83) to become the fastest ever in the event.

In this GMM podcast episode, Hunter Armstrong opens up about the year after Paris, and it’s not the story most people expect. Fresh off Olympic gold and silver in 2024, Hunter assumed momentum would carry him forward. Instead, he lost his top sponsor. The financial runway tightened. Training didn’t get cheaper. And 2025 became a grind. At this point in swimming history, Olympic gold does not equal financial security. Now Hunter’s made a decision that’s making headlines on SwimSwam. Hunter will compete at the upcoming Enhanced Games, but he’s doing it clean. To be clear, Hunter will not b...

SwimSwam sat down with Nic Askew, the head coach for Howard University's swimming and diving teams (as well as tennis), who is coming off a historic performance at the NEC Conference Champs. Not only did the Howard men's swimming defend their team title from last year, but the women joined the party this year, winning their first conference championship in program history. As the coach of the only HBCU to field a Division I Swimming & Diving program, Askew knows how to put things in perspective. He knows that to win a team title, it takes a team effort. He...

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we are discussing last week's SEC, ACC, and Women's Big 10 Championships as well as previewing the Big 12 and Men's Big 10 Championships.

Today’s conversation is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. It’s rooted in a feature story that stopped me in my tracks when I first read it in our upcoming Swimsuit issue of SwimSwam Magazine (dropping March 29th). The piece is titled “What Remains When the Stopwatch Stops,” written beautifully by Anya Pelshaw. Anya's an exceptional talent, and she captured something rare in her interview. It's not just the résumé of a great coach, it's the architecture of a life built on belief.

Today on the GMM podcast we have University o...

This week on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we preview the upcoming SEC, ACC, and Women's Big Ten Championships. 

We wanted to catch up because Regan is one of the most fun conversations in the sport. She’s transparent for someone living inside the elite bubble. You can ask her about most anything, and she doesn’t default to clichés. That’s why we’re calling this episode What Does Regan Smith Think? 

2x Olympic medalist Ilya Kharun announced earlier this week that he would be switching his sporting citizenship from Canada to the USA.

Carsten Vissering was an absolute force during his time in the pool. Breaking national high school and age records as a teenager, he went on to swim for the University of Southern California in college. As a Trojan, Vissering won an NCAA title in 2018 as a part of the 200 medley relay and 2 Pac-12 Titles. Once Vissering walked away from swimming, though, he wasn't done with elite sport. After aquatic retirement, Vissering still wanted to compete and ended up stumbling into bobsledding in 2022. He made the US national team and worked his way up the ranks until, earlier this month...

Marrit Steenbergen had a heck of a 2025 season. At the 2025 World Championships in Singapore, she touched first in the 100 free, defending her world title from 2024. Then, to end the year, she won 6 gold medals in Lublin at the SC European Championships, where she also set 5 European records. Steenbergen joins us to discuss her big year and her new training style that has brought her success so far. While she's in the water 8-9x per week during much of the season, she's started the last two seasons by only swimming 3 days per week (5x within those three days) and...

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we review the Pro Swim Series in Austin, USA Swimming's financial situation, and the future of the Enhanced Games.

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we preview the upcoming Pro Swim Series in Austin and make our wild predictions for the 2026 year of Swimming.

Hannah Bellard turned heads last weekend when she topped the 200 fly field at the Indiana-Michigan dual meet. The reigning Big Ten Champion in the event, Bellard touched in 1:50.72, a Michigan school and Big Ten Conference record and the top time in the country by over a second, not to mention a huge PB for the junior. 

When we sat down with Bellard to discuss the swim and her season, we got an interesting piece of insight. In the spring of 2025, the rising junior felt like she was just going through the motions with her swimming. This was a...

Cody Miller signing onto to the Enhanced Games was a curveball, but not wholly unexpected, which is partly why we asked Miller to come on the podcast. For the record: SwimSwam has no commercial or financial affiliation with the Enhanced Games. We are covering it journalistically. That will make some people uncomfortable. But discomfort isn’t a disqualifier, especially when the moment is this consequential.

In this GMM Podcast, we sit down with Jake Gibbons, a talented young coach at one of the most powerful prep programs in swimming history, The Bolles School. Jake’s connection to Bolles is personal. He swam for the Bolles Sharks from 2013 to 2015, absorbing the culture, the expectations, and the weight of a program that has produced Olympic champions and global stars. From there, his path wasn’t linear. He detoured briefly through Yale before landing at Texas A&M, where his career sharpened into leadership as much as performance. At A&M, Jake captained the team, earned multiple CSCA...

There’s a certain quiet confidence that comes from longevity. You don’t need to thump your chest when the résumé does the talking. This GMM podcast brings together Thad Schultz, one of the most experienced coaches in swimming, and Erkhes Enkhtur, a rising international talent rewriting Mongolian swimming history books from the lanes of SPIRE Academy.

Recently, at the Katie Ledecky Invite, a swim meet hosted by Nation's Capital Swim Club and named for their most notable alumna, history was made. Katie Ledecky herself participated in the last night of competition, swimming in the 1,650 freestyle. The 14x Olympic medalist wowed her hometown crowd as she threw down a monstrous 14:59.62, breaking her own American and US Open records in the event and making her the first woman in history to dip under the 15-minute barrier.

This swim not only rippled across the entire current swimming landscape, but it will undoubtedly inspire swimmers for years...

Kyle Sockwell has long branded himself as the “CEO of Fun,” but anyone who has worked with him behind the scenes knows that label only tells half the story. Sockwell, now the COO of the newly announced College Swimming League (CSL), has built a reputation in aquatic sports for something that’s surprisingly rare in this industry: clarity. Behind the scenes, he’s direct about what he knows and what he doesn’t. Clear about what’s possible and what isn’t. And refreshingly uninterested in spin or “gotcha” communication. That matters when the topic is a massive structural shifts in college...

Head Coach Matt Bowe is in his 3rd year at Michigan, and the results are starting to show. Recently, at the CSCAA Dual Meet Tournament, the UM women placed 2nd and the men were 3rd (out of 4 teams), both breaking school records. Both teams not only won very close matchups that came down to the last relay (women vs Tennessee and men vs Virginia), but the women also handed the Virginia women a rare loss in the 200 medley relay. Bowe came on the SwimSwam podcast to discuss how he has been building culture since arriving in Ann Arbor and...

SwimSwam's Editor-in-Chief, Braden Keith, sat down with the new CEO of USA Swimming, Kevin Ring, for a candid conversation. Keith asked Ring 10 hard questions about the state of USA Swimming and what he will do to address those issues. Ring answered honestly and with some breaking news peppered in. This includes raising APA rates (athlete salaries) for the first time in over a decade and holding an SCM meet to help select rosters for SCM World Championships.

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we are previewing the US Open, Short Course European Championships, and the Minnesota Invite.

As a Freshman at Texas, Nate Germonprez was training freestyle and backstroke, focusing on IM but also swimming on the 800 free relay. Flash forward year and a half later, and Germonprez is the #4 performer in history in the 100 breast, only .2 off the NCAA and US Open records. Listen to the junior at Texas as he explains what has changed about his training since the arrival of Bob Bowman and how he has capitalized on his breaststroke ability.

Will Modglin made a statement last weekend at the Texas Hall of Fame Invite. In his first swim, the 50 back leading off the 200 medley relay, he swam 20.00, the fastest 50y back in history. He went onto swim a 43.26 in the 100 back, breaking the American record and coming within .06 of his teammate, Hubi Kos's, NCAA record. Modglin also swam a 50.91 100 Breast, one of four loghorns who broke the 51-second barrier in the event. The funny thing about that: Modglin doesn't train breaststroke. At all. The WUG's gold medalist from this summer gets into this and more in today's episode.

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we discuss Rylee Erisman reclassifying to 2026 and going to Cal, Audrey Derivaux to Texas, and recap the first week of Mid-Season Meet pandamonium.

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we preview the major Mid-Season Meets coming up this week in the NCAA.

Entering his 3rd season with the California Golden Bears, Noah Yanchulis has already experienced many highs of coaching a college team. He's been a part of a conference champion team, chased an NCAA team title, and been a part of a Team USA coaching staff. We spoke with Yanchulis today about his time with the bears and how he's developed his system for coaching the 400 IM/distance groups, which now has up to 24 athletes on any given day, with the massive addition of 20 freshmen (men and women) this fall. This past summer, after Cal put 5 athletes on the world...

Ryan Coughenour has had a full journey leading into his senior year of high school. His grandfather was an Oklahoma state champion in the 1940s and went on to swim at Kansas State University (when they had a swim program) as well as compete at the US Olympic Trials in the 1950s. He has supported Ryan through his swimming career and encouraged him to pursue it in college. During the pandemic, when Ryan was in middle school and just starting to swim seriously, he started buying sneakers online and re-selling them for profit. Well, not for profit at first...

Today we have swimming superstar Summer McIntosh. She talked a little over an hour and nothing was off-limits. Before we hit record, she said, “Go for it. I’m ready to discuss anything.” We caught up during her three-week altitude block at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, where she’s working under new coach, Bob Bowman. And, of course, she recently announced her global partnership with Arena. (see link below). This podcast is loaded. Summer provides insight and backstory across a lot of topics. She certainly breaks through the noise of the internet, allowing us  us peek into the mind...

We sit down with Texas A&M Director of Swimming and Diving Blaire Anderson, a coaching talent to watch in the coming years as she develops the Aggies in the new era. In just her first year running the combined Aggie program, Anderson has already left a mark, guiding the men’s team to a 5th-place finish at the 2026 SEC Championships and 12th at NCAA Championships, while the women’s squad placed 8th at SECs and 25th at the NCAA Championships.

Today on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we discuss phenomenal age group swimming from China's Yu Zidi and USA's Luka Mijatovic and the new Pro Swim Series format.

We’re diving into the deep end of storytelling with Ben Brostoff, author of Trials: A Novel of Olympic Swimming Dreams and Redemption. It’s a swimming novel for swimmers written by one. Trials follows three swimmers — Hunter Banks, Connor Mahoney, and Miles Green — whose lives are intertwined by one defining moment: the 2004 Olympic Trials, where all three break the world record in the 400 IM. What follows is a two-decade journey through triumph and heartbreak, doping scandals, supersuits, world records, marriage, loss, and the relentless chase of a dream that refuses to die.

This GMM podcast with Caeleb Dressel is wild. Ninety minutes of raw honesty, humor, and pure fun. Dressel details how he departed the University of Florida pro group on great terms. He and coach Anthony Nesty are clearly very close. Dressel explains his new training team, headed by Steve Jungbluth at Sporting Jax Aquatic Club, with heavy strength support from Sean Kao at Aquatic Sports Performance.

On Friday, the #1 ranked recruit in the High School class of 2027, Luka MIjatovic, announced his commitment to the University of Texas. In this podcast, we discuss his decision to go train with Bob Bowman, his experience at World Championships, and training for mid-distance freestyle.