Men’s Swim and Dive Brings Season to Bay at NCAA Championships

Harvard men’s swim and dive docked its season at shore on Sunday, wrapping up a four-day stay at the NCAA Championships with its first team standing finish since 2022.

The Crimson sent a pair of Ivy League champions and program record holders — freshman William Mulgrew and sophomore Adriano Arioti — to Atlanta, Ga., in hopes of solidifying its presence on the national stage.

Mulgrew finished ninth in the finals for 1650-yard freestyle (14:40.07) and 23rd for the 500-yard freestyle, while Arioti finished in 45th for the 100-yard backstroke and 29th for the 200-yard backstroke.

Overall, Harvard secured a 39th-place team finish.

“It was a solid meet for both of those guys — first time for both of them qualifying for NCAA, but they handled the pressure pretty well, and it should set them up for the next couple or several years, depending on how fast they swim,” head coach Kevin Tyrrell said.

Mulgrew entered the national finals for the 1650-yard freestyle with the third-best time (14:26.79) in the nation, trailing the season record by just three seconds.

Earlier this month, the rookie snatched the Ivy League and Harvard program records in two events: the 1650-yard and 1000-yard freestyles. He also broke the Crimson record in the 500-yard freestyle — all at the Ivy League Championships.

“Unquestionably, the weeks leading up to NCAAs are probably a little bit boring for them in terms of just swimming by themselves, especially when the school is on spring break the week before they depart for championships,” Tyrrell said. “It’s probably more taxing mentally than it is physically, but that’s sort of the price you need to pay if you’re going to be good at that level.”

The Walpole, Mass., native went on to finish second in the 500-yard freestyle at the Ivy event, behind Yale’s senior Noah Millard and a top-10 finisher at last year’s NCAA Championships. Millard finished in tenth at the NCAA Championships on Friday.

Winning two gold medals in the 1650-yard and 1000-yard freestyle at the Ivy League Championships, Mulgrew capped off a strong collegiate debut season, in which he had been meeting NCAA cut-off times as early as December at the Minnesota Invitational.

“He’s a member of the USA Swimming national team, so he had some more experience at higher-level meets coming into Harvard. I think he sort of even outdid what he might think he was capable of this year,” Tyrrell said.

“Getting freshman year under your belt gives you a basis of knowledge of how Harvard works, and merging those two really puts them in a good spot moving forward,” he added.

At the Ivy League Championships, Arioti set the second-best program record in the 200-yard backstroke (1:39.60), winning the event to spark Harvard’s final push on the meet’s closing day. The sophomore also won bronze in the 100-yard backstroke, behind Cornell junior Blake Conway and Columbia senior Isaac Beers. Conway finished in 43rd, two spots ahead of Arioti, in Georgia.

“Our big goals, from a department standpoint, are to try to win Ivy Championships. NCAA is certainly a part of Harvard offering — academic and athletic excellence. But what we want to do is really prove ourselves versus other Ivy competition,” the coach said.

The Crimson will now look toward preparations for next season, welcoming a new class of freshmen as the team looks to restart its seven-year Ivy League championship streak from just two years ago.

“We’re just really looking forward to our freshmen arriving on campus, and it’ll be fun to integrate them into the program and into Harvard life in general,” Tyrrell said. “The dynamics change from season to season, so we’re trying to make sure that everybody meshes well at the beginning. Then we can do well across the board — when they feel like they're a part of the team and the other guys want to support them.”

—Staff writer Uy B. Pham can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ubp.88. Follow him on X @uybpham.