Over 2,300 Fans Show Up for Friday Night at the Eddie Reese Showdown with LONG Beer Lines
01/24/2025 10:18 PM
By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
2025 EDDIE REESE SHOWDOWN
- January 24-25, 2025
- Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center — Austin, Texas
- 25 Yards (SCY)
- Meet Info
- Live Results, also available on MeetMobile as "Eddie Reese Texas Showdown"
- Friday Morning Live Recap
- Friday Night Live Recap
- Friday Night Livestream
The University of Texas-hosted Eddie Reese Showdown is bar-none the highlight of the 2024-2025 college swimming regular season, featuring the defending NCAA Champions on the men’s side (Arizona State) and women’s side (Virginia), perennial top 5 program NC State, and the team that hired away the Arizona State head coach Texas.
A meet months in the making, with the coaches from all four programs working together to put on an event with a presentation worthy of the competition, Friday night’s televised session reported an official crowd of 2,331 spectators. While the NCAA doesn’t keep official attendance records in swimming & diving (one of the only sports where they don’t), this is the new benchmark for collegiate swimming and diving meets.
Only three other indoor pools in the United States have permanent spectator capacity for that many:
- The IU Natatorium in Indianapolis – 4,700
- Greensboro Aquatic Center – 2,600
- Jamail Texas Swimming Center – 2,500
- King County Aquatic Center – 2,500
Plus a couple of outdoor pools – like the Avery Aquatic Center at Stanford (2,500).
There are rumors of overflow crowds at some of these big outdoor pools in decades past, and record keeping isn’t good enough to rule out that there was a bigger meet at some point – but at least in the recent wave of excitement about college swimming, this is the biggest crowd yet.
The energy in the pool was electric; the live stream was exciting; the teams were engaged; and the swims were fast. Exciting formats and big crowds make for fast swimming, and fast swimming matters.
The only complaint of the whole night was that there weren’t enough folks working the beer line – a sentence I never imagined that I’d be able to attach to a swim meet.
Note: for those who don’t know Will, he’s a fun loving guy who loves swimming and loves joking around. We got to spend some time with him at Trials, and this Tweet is definitely tongue-in-cheek.
And yet they only had two people working the concession stand for Lappy Hour, and they were both unaware of the Lappy Hour until I told them about it and they text their boss to confirm. The line was soooooooo long to get a beer My life is so hard
— Will (@willlerch) January 25, 2025
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