Second-year Cooper Costello captured the first individual national championship of his career, and three relay teams also left Greensboro, N.C. with titles as the University of Chicago men’s swimming and diving team finished third at the NCAA Division III national championships for the third straight year.
Costello earned the first title of the weekend for the Maroons on the second day of the meet when he broke the NCAA D-III record, previously held by UChicago alum Jesse Ssengonzi, BA’24, with a time of 45.97 during the 100-yard butterfly event.
“Winning the 100-yard fly was certainly a satisfying moment that proved all my hard work had paid off, but my focus for the meet truly centered around team success,” said Costello. “I knew that it was partially my responsibility to ensure that the newcomers had a great experience succeeding as a team, and that the seniors could appreciate all of their hard work through their final races.”
Costello followed through on those words by helping both the 400-yard freestyle and 800-yard freestyle relay teams capture NCAA championships of their own. The longer of the two distances earned their title first with the second-year joining first-years Alex Schwartz and John Butler, and fourth-year Sebastien Vernhes in the victory with a time of 6:26.98, breaking the UChicago school record and tying the national mark that was set back in 2023.
Vernhes and Butler joined Costello during the 400-yard freestyle win, who along with graduate student Daniel Brooks, finished the race in another Maroons best result of 2:54.20. Vernhes proceeded to match Costello’s national title output when he helped second-years Rylan Kruep and Igor Benderskii and fourth-year Jonathan Tang touch the wall first in the 200-yard freestyle relay event. The three relay victories at the meet eclipsed the total of two relay event championships that UChicago had earned in their 50+ year history heading into the 2025 championships.
“I have always been better on relays rather than individual events, and I think there could have been no end more fitting than to cap off my collegiate career with three relay national titles,” said Vernhes. “What made those wins even more meaningful was sharing them with my teammates. I’m grateful to have played a small part in bringing each of those guys their trophies.”
Head coach Jason Weber noted the accomplishment of winning three relay titles at one meet and how hard that is to pull off against strong competition.
“We know how difficult it is to win just one, especially with how competitive D3 is, so winning three relay titles in dominating fashion with an NCAA record thrown in there, is really exciting and a special moment in our program’s history,” said Weber. “This year all four guys on every one of those free relays were ‘on’ and we knew if that happened, nobody could beat us.”
Overall, the Maroons finished in third place for the third straight year with a total of 272 points and have finished the championship meets no worse than seventh dating back to the 2021 season.
“We knew we had a talented class coming in, including a couple graduate transfers that were top D3 swimmers, so we thought we could be just as good, if not better than last year if the incoming class and our returners improved, which is exactly what happened,” Weber said. “We had a good group of guys that worked hard and pushed each other to improve and be at their best.”