Indiana swim and dive opens season with dominant CSL win

No. 2/5 Indiana swim and dive opened its 2026-27 season in Westmont, Illinois, to kick off the primary College Swimming League match. The males’s and ladies’s groups scored collectively and completed in first place with 575.5 factors, greater than 100 factors forward of the University of Louisville. 

The College Swimming League is a brand new 12-team collegiate swimming collection held through the NCAA fall swimming season. CSL CEO Robert Kent based the league to raise collegiate swimming to business prominence in collaboration with broadcasters and sponsors. 

Indiana set the tone for the CSL early in Thursday’s meet, as senior Miranda Grana swam a private greatest within the ladies’s 200-yard backstroke with a successful time of 1:49.85, netting the Hoosiers 10 factors early within the meet.  

By ending greater than 6.76 seconds forward of eighth, Grana used the jackpot swim rule, which permits swimmers who end first forward of eighth by a sure variety of seconds to steal factors from the swimmers they beat. 

Junior Raekwon Noel clinched the boys’s 200-yard backstroke title in 1:39.02, giving the Hoosiers one other 10 factors by finishing a jackpot swim. He additionally completed first within the males’s 100-yard backstroke and second within the males’s 100-yard butterfly. 

Sophomore Josh Bey completed first within the males’s 200-yard breaststroke, stopping the clock at 1:52.46. Bey is likely one of the favorites for the NCAA title within the occasion, coming into this season because the 2026 Big Ten Swimmer of the Year. Bey additionally completed first within the males’s 200-yard particular person medley and fourth within the males’s 200-yard freestyle. 

Sophomore Alex Shackel secured one other jackpot victory for the Hoosiers within the ladies’s 200-yard butterfly, taking factors from swimmers in fifth by way of eighth together with her dominant successful time of 1:52.24 seconds, whereas additionally gathering a jackpot within the ladies’s 50-yard butterfly skins. She completed the race with 19 factors and received the ladies’s MVP award for the occasion, in accordance with SwimSwam. 

Skins is a sort of race the place swimmers compete in an elimination fashion dash race in back-to-back rounds over brief distances. After the conclusion of every spherical, the final finishers are eradicated till one swimmer stays. Super skins is a variation of this format with the identical rules however with a relay staff. 

Sophomore Liberty Clark took house three victories within the inaugural CSL occasion, successful the ladies’s 100-yard freestyle, ladies’s 50-yard freestyle and the ladies’s 200-yard freestyle. She ended the day including 29 factors for the Hoosiers. She made it to the third spherical of the ladies’s 50-yard butterfly skins earlier than being eradicated. 

Indiana dominated all 4 rounds of the ladies’s 200-yard medley relay tremendous skins, ending first in each spherical aside from the opening race through which it completed third by 0.09 seconds. In the ultimate spherical, the staff of Grana, junior Anita Bottazzo, Shackell and fifth-year senior Kristina Paegle got here out on prime over Michigan with a last time of 1:35.23. 

The Hoosiers collectively completed the meet in first place, totaling 575.5 factors total. Indiana now returns house to the Counsilman-Billingsley Aquatic Center in Bloomington to host the Cream and Crimson exhibition at 2 p.m. Oct. 2.