With 10 athletes at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships in Atlanta, USC’s men’s team managed a stunning performance across the three-day meet from March 25 to 28.

Racking up 69 points and finishing in 14th place, the men (4-5, 0-1 Big Ten) tied the 2025–26 season with their second consecutive top-15 finish at the NCAA Championships.

The strong finale came thanks in no small part to the efforts of the diving team, which executed some of its best performances so far this season. Graduate diver Moritz Wesemann was on a hot streak after winning both the 1- and 3-meter events at the NCAA Zone E Diving Championships in Flagstaff at the beginning of the month — momentum he would lean into in Georgia as one of the strongest multi-event divers at the competition. 

For the second consecutive year, Wesemann achieved First Team All-American honors in the 1-meter springboard event and fifth place overall with the highest quantitative score of 406.85. 

The 3-meter event featured both Wesemann and senior Laurent Gosselin-Paradis in the top 20 scores in the prelims. In the finals, Wesemann reached the podium for a bronze after scoring a program record-breaking 485.85 points and First Team All-American honors — the Trojans’ highest-ranked finish of the weekend — and Gosselin-Paradis finished with Second Team All-American honors at 16th. 

Gosselin-Paradis and senior Robert Gref represented USC in the platform event. Gref placed 31st and Gosselin-Paradis took seventh place as the first Trojan to reach the event’s finals at the NCAA Championships since Dashiell Enos in 2018. The former also clinched First Team All-American honors for the first time in his career during his final career meet.

The swimmers assembled a dream team for freestyle and medley relays to maximize their impact across four events for top-30 finishes in each. 

The 200 medley and 400 freestyle relay teams proved successful, finishing 21st and 27th, respectively, with graduate student Jan Bialecki supplementing the latter with a 42.86 split. Sophomore Oliver Sogaard-Andersen, graduate student Vaggelis Makrygiannis and junior Michal Chmielewski also made appearances in both events. 

Sophomore Junhao Chan swam another breaststroke leg after the 200 as an essential part of the 400 medley relay, helping the team pull ahead to reach 14th place for Second Team All-American honors. 

However, the men excelled most in the 800 freestyle relay, with junior Ian Pickles closing the relay for an overall drop of almost a second, landing the men in 13th place for yet another Second Team All-American honor finish.

Beyond the relays, several of the Trojans had their own battles to wage, including both of the Chmielewskis. 

After swimming the second leg of the 800 freestyle relay, junior Krzysztof Chmielewski placed 39th in the 500 freestyle as the only distance swimmer for USC at the meet.

Michal Chmielewski dominated the butterfly events, starting by placing 10th in the 100 butterfly with a program record-breaking swim of 44.42 — the fourth time the junior has broken the program record in the 2025–26 season. 

The 200 fly proved even more successful for Michal Chmielewski in a tight race for 12th, finishing just a millisecond behind the two swimmers tied for 10th and before the athlete in 13th. Nevertheless, the junior finished the event with Second Team All-American honors while tacking on a 26th-place finish in the 100 backstroke at a 45.16 time for good measure.

Sorengaard-Andersen nailed down the individual freestyle events for the Trojans, earning 23rd in the 200 free — seven milliseconds off of his best time of 1:32.02 — and taking 34th in the 100 free at a time of 42.25. 

In an impressive end to the season, USC’s performance in the NCAA Championships has set a high standard for next season. The Trojans have a lot to be proud of, including multiple records broken and several All-American honors earned — the cake Head Coach Lea Maurer described at the top of the season, crowned with a cherry on top.