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