Team USA Will Head to Croatia for Training Camp on June 4

At the conclusion of the US International Team Trials on Saturday, USA Swimming named 41 athletes and 7 coaches to the country’s pool swimming roster for the World Aquatics Championships.

The pool swimming events will run from June 18-25 at the Danube Arena in Budapest, Hungary. The six week gap from the end of Trials to the start of the World Championships is a little longer than we usually see at this point in the cycle. In 2017, for example, it was just 13 days from the end of Trials to the beginning of the World Championships (though it was 22 days until swimming began in the back-half of the meet).

This year, even with swimming in the front-half of the Worlds schedule, athletes will have 49 days before the World Championships. Remember that Trials were originally scheduled around a May World Championship meet in Fukuoka, Japan, and USA Swimming opted not to move that meet.

For those athletes coming out of the collegiate season, who might have had three big rest meets in three months, that extra gap gives them some flexibility in how they try to approach holding on to their speed.

So what’s next for Team USA? Here’s what the team’s travel schedule looks like:

• Training Camp June 6-14, 2022 ◙ Rijeka, Croatia
• International Training June 14-17, 2022 ◙ Budapest, Hungary
• Competition June 18-25, 2022 ◙ Budapest, Hungary
• Return home June 26, 2022

Athletes and coaches will head to Croatia to train at the Kantrida Swimming Pool Complex in Rijeka on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. In the northwestern part of the country, Kantrida is about 5 hours from Budapest by bus, 8 hours by train, or 3 hours by airplane.

The complex is the same one that hosted Team USA before the 2017 World Championships, so this will be familiar territory for those athletes who are returning. By our count, there were 11 swimmers who competed at the 2017 World Championships in Budapest who are back for 2022.

Shortly before athletes leave for the training camp, USA Swimming will stage its next and final stop of the truncated 2022 Pro Swim Series. That meet is scheduled for June 1-4 in Mission Viejo, California. Given the 5+ hour travel time from the East Coast, which would need to be repeated to travel back to Croatia, not many national teamers are expected to participate. It is plausible that we might see a few local athletes swim a race or two before heading out, but there are historically-few swimmers on this team who are based out of Southern California, so even that won’t make sense for many athletes.