Streak Continues: Cal Earns 15th Consecutive Top-Two Finish at NCAA Championships
The final standings were not decided until the bitter end, and Cal had to hold off a flurry of Indiana point-scoring in the breaststroke and diving events. Saturday evening, that meant 37 points in the 200 breast, led by surprise winner Jassen Yep, and 39 from platform diving behind three-time champion Carson Tyler. But Cal did enough to finish the NCAA Men’s Championships with 471 points, just ahead of Indiana’s 459.
That put the Golden Bears second in the team standings, marking the 15th consecutive season in which the team has placed in the top-two at the national meet. There have been six national titles and nine runnerup finishes in that span, with Texas winning the championship in seven of those nine years. While Cal finished only 19 points behind Texas, Cal has actually come closer to the top spot on two occasions, finishing 17 points behind in 2021 and just 11.5 off the Longhorns in 2018.
But even though this title attempt came up just short, Cal performed to the best of its abilities in March, as has become tradition under head coach Dave Durden, who was in the third year of his tenure in Berkeley when the streak began. The team have looked a little different throughout the years, and this one distinguished itself despite winning no events after the first session of the meet, when Cal’s 800 free relay became the first team to ever break 6:00.
Destin Lasco — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
The highest individual finish for the team was second place, which Destin Lasco accomplished on two occasions and Dare Rose achieved in the final individual swimming event. Lasco had won both the 200 IM and 200 backstroke last season, but he could not keep up with the astonishing efforts of Hubert Kos this time around. When Lasco’s final surge in the medley final came up just seven hundredths short Thursday evening, Cal could not have expected that it would not come that close to winning another event and yet the title remain within reach until the final session.
The top individual point-scorer on the roster was Lucas Henveaux, who pulled off a trio of third-place finishes in the 500 free, 400 IM and 1650 free. Rose had his best performance at an NCAA Championships as he finished second in the 200 fly and fourth in the 100-yard event. Gabriel Jett had a disappointing 500 free, falling to 30th place, but he rebounded to collect third-place honors in the 200 free and 200 back.
Senior sprinter Jack Alexy lacks the turns and underwaters to compete with the likes of Jordan Crooks and Josh Liendo in short course yards, but he still was able to finish fourth in the 100 free and fifth in both the 50 and 200 while providing a significant relay punch. Mewen Tomac, a French backstroker who only arrived at Cal this semester, managed fourth-place finishes over both 100 and 200 yards.
Cal was expected to struggle in breaststroke this season following the departure of 2024 100-yard champion Liam Bell, but freshman Yamato Okadome capably filled that void by placing sixth in the 200 breast and seventh in the 100, and his medley relay splits were each the second-quickest in the field.
Those swims made Cal the only team to place an A-finalist in every swimming event. While Texas wracked up 27 points in diving, Cal did not score on the boards, with Geoffrey Vavitsas topping out at 18th on platform. Thus, the Golden Bears actually ended up with the most swimming points of any school. The distinction of wining the swimming events but not the entire competition has happened on several occasions throughout Cal’s run of top-two finishes, beginning with the first year of the streak in 2010.
Following this meet, the majority of Cal’s main contributors are out of NCAA eligibility, with only Okadome set to return to the college squad next season. We can expect swimmers such as Keaton Jones, already an Olympic finalist in the 200-meter back, to take on a bigger role in 2025-26, and Cal could also turn to the transfer portal to find new contributors. But given the track record of Cal under Durden’s leadership, we would not bet against a 16th-straight appearance in the top-two.
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