MONTEREY PARK, Calif. – Caltech Men's Swim & Dive wrapped up the 2025 SCIAC Championships this past Saturday. The men finished with a respectable fourth-place finish and 440 points over the four-day meet, nearly identical to their performance at the conference championships last season. The men were able to pursue greatness and overcome the adversity of not being able to train for serious lapses of time due to the Eaton fire. 

First-year swimmer Aaron Dumas (San Diego, Calif. / Cathedral Catholic) set a Caltech school record in the 100-yard backstroke event this season. The promising rookie finished with a time of 50.53 seconds on Friday, good enough for 5th place at the meet, just 1.63 seconds behind the leader.

Sophomore butterfly specialist Marcel Liu (Natick, Mass. / Phillips Academy) also swam his way into the Caltech record books. At the SCIAC Championships, Liu finished in fifth place with a time of 49.69 seconds. Not to be outdone, first-year Sam Xie (Princeton, N.J. / The Lawrenceville School) had a fantastic performance at the SCIAC championships, finishing with the second-fastest 100-yard butterfly time in school history (49.09), good enough for third place. As a whole the team's butterfly swimmers racked up serious points in the 100-yard butterfly event, with four swimmers, Liu, Xie, Alvin Zhang (Bellevue, Wash. / Lakeside School), and Zachary Pestrikov (Rye, N.Y. / Iona Preparatory) qualifying for the championship final and two more swimmers, Aaron Dumas and Pierre Zeineddin (Gaithersberg, Md. / Richard Montgomery racing in the consolation heat.

These three weren't the only ones to etch their name into the Caltech record books, as senior bioengineering major Sam Small (Ringwood, U.K. / Ringwood School) finished first in the 100-yard freestyle consolation final with a time of 45.78 seconds! Small was able to edge out Caltech alum Henry Baer's 2015 SCIAC Championship performance by 0.16 seconds, good enough for fourth place all-time in school history.

Another notable performance came from junior Max Chen (Boyds, Md. / Poolesville). Chen finished first place in the 200-yard butterfly consolation final, finishing with a time of 1:54:45. Simon Hu (Clarksville, Md. / River Hill) also won the 200-yard freestyle consolation final and finished with a time of 1:41:58.

First-year electrical engineering major Thomas Fenton (Lynchburg, Va. / Virginia Episcopal School) finished in fourth place at the 200-yard breaststroke event, finishing with a 2:02:57 time.

Dumas, Fenton, Xie, and Small combined for an impressive fourth-place finish in the 400-yard medley relay.

Rounding out the performances is first-year Anthony Wang (San Jose, Calif. /  Evergreen Valley), who showed adversity and made an impressive comeback after suffering an injury during diving warmups just a few weeks earlier. Wang entered the 3-meter diving event and finished sixth out of 15 competitors with an 11-dive score of 418.40, also picking up ninth on the 1-meter board with a score of 369.25.

Head Coach Andy Brabson and the Beavers will be back in action for the Winter 2025-26 season but will cheer on Anthony Wang as he heads to Grinnell College in Iowa for the NCAA Diving Regionals, where he will represent Caltech.