Division III Title is Storybook Ending for NYU’s Kaley McIntyre
The results of Kaley McIntyre the swimmer and the demeanor of Kaley McIntyre the person don’t always fit the assumptions of one another.
Her tale of the tape is fearsome. McIntyre is one of the best female freestylers in Division III history. She’s a four-time NCAA champion in each the 50 free and 200 free, a three-time champion in the 100 free. She’s one of only five female swimmers in Division III history to win 11 national titles.
It’s 15 national titles in all, three Division III Women’s Swimmer of the Year honors, 27 All-American certificates and the most treasured accolade of all, a maiden NCAA Championship for New York University in her senior year.
But within the gilded credentials of a fearsome sprinter is still the swimmer that lost two high school seasons to the COVID-19 pandemic, who traveled cross country with no expectations for her college career after having never made the state meet in California – albeit a high bar in CIF competition.
“That’s something that always lives in the back of my brain, not ever being at the top,” McIntyre told Swimming World. “It doesn’t feel real, almost.”
It is real, though. And it’s beyond what the native of Novato, California, envisioned for where swimming might take her.
McIntyre entered college with modest expectations. It isn’t self-deprecation when she says she never expected to win one national title much less 15 – not after finishing 11th in the 100 free and 12th in the 100 backstroke at the CIF North Coast Sectional Championships in the spring of 2022, an entire swimming lifetime ago. Imposing as she is on the pool deck, the 6-0 senior comes off as thoughtful and soft-spoken, a platonic ideal of a Division III athlete.
McIntyre knew she was underrecruited coming out of high school, given pandemic disruptions that hit Northern California particularly hard. She characterizes NYU coach Trevor Miele’s decision to recruit her as “giving me the shot to prove myself.” She’s repaid Miele and his staff many times over.
As a freshman in 2023, McIntyre burst onto the scene at NCAAs. She outdueled reigning champion Taylor Leone of Emory in the 50 free to win in 22.78, a race she entered as the 10th seed. She won the 200 free, again in a head-to-head matchup with the reigning champ, more than a second quicker than what Tufts’ Claire Brennan had registered the season before.
Her third event, which now seems bizarre, was the 200 back, finishing ninth. It would her last individual NCAAs event on any podium step but the highest.
The Violets finished fifth as a team that year at NCAAs, the best finish in program history. In the moment, it felt like a start. Posterity has proven that prescient.
“I never expected to win a national title individually, let alone as a team,” McIntyre said. “I think as a freshman, I was pretty naïve and was just putting in the hard work but not really expecting anything on the national level. I think after that first year is when the team as a whole kind of started to realize we have a real shot at building and developing something that is capable of winning a national title.”
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The steps would come in narratively satisfying fashion. A year later, McIntyre was a triple individual champion for the third-place Violets. As a junior, she helped the team finish second. It was, simply, MIT’s year, driven by a special class of seniors.
That 2025 result was a volcanic shift in the Division III landscape. From 1997 to 2024 (with he two-year hiatus for COVID), only three schools had won an NCAA title: Kenyon, Denison and Emory. Only two more – Williams and Amherst – had registered top-two finishes. The three-lettered interlopers represented monumental change.
With their most special swimmer a senior, 2026 was NYU’s year. It would take a special crew of freshmen to get them over the line, augmenting the efforts of McIntyre and fellow senior Nicole Ranile, who defended her 200 fly title.
Kaley McIntyre; Photo Courtesy: NYU Athletics
NYU won the 800 free relay without McIntyre. Both it and the victorious 200 and 400 free relays that McIntyre anchored included two freshmen, as did the third-place 400 medley relay. Among those is Llew Ladomirak, who finished third in the 500 free, second to McIntyre in the 200 free and sixth in the 100 free, with classmate Maeve O’Donnell third.
McIntyre has, for the last three years, flawlessly defended her every title. That was not the same, she points out, as doing so without nerves.
“I had a coach come up to me at NCAAs this year and was like, you looked so nervous before you’re 50 free,” she said. “And it was kind of funny because some people think that I don’t get nervous, but I definitely was always thinking about it. I’m always super nervous. And from that moment my freshman year, when I was first seed going into the 50 free (finals), I’ve not really felt peace with it, I guess. But nerves and that pressure is a privilege, so I kind of accepted it.”
McIntyre’s success has come with an embrace of the Division III lifestyle. She worried early in her career if living in New York was for her, but she never doubted that D3’s balance of academics and athletics suited her. Her early success would’ve entailed no shortage of offers to jump to Division I if she chose, and two NCAA champions from 2025 – Bowdoin’s Natalie Garre (to Brown) and Kenyon’s Bengisu Caymaz (Virginia Tech) – made the jump in divisions.
But McIntyre never courted that.
“I would have never considered leaving Division III, just because I loved the community and befriending people at other schools and everything,” she said. “I feel like there’s a little bit less of an opportunity for that across the other divisions, maybe it’s because there’s more competition or maybe it’s a little less friendly. But I never considered leaving Division III. And NYU itself, I just owe a lot to the school because they were the school to give me a chance.”
McIntyre has left NYU plenty in return. The Violets led MIT by 20 points entering the final day fo the 2025 NCAA Championships. McIntyre won the 100 free on the final night, in an A final over three MIT swimmers. MIT’s Kate Augustyn followed with a win in the 200 back, the Engineers scored one A finalist and one B finalist to NYU’s two 3-meter diving B finalists, and Augustyn and fellow senior Alex Turvey prevailed in the 400 free relay to take the title back to Cambridge.
“It was just MIT’s year,” McIntyre said. “They outswam themselves, and we put up a really good fight, and I think that’s all we could do.
“Some people have the feeling of getting second as being the first loser. I definitely did not take it as that. We as a team last year did something our program had never thought about really doing. … I think we came into it this year knowing we were in that fight last year, and it was our time to finally win it.”
McIntyre is reticent to make even the question of her legacy too much about her, preferring to widen the aperture. She lists her favorite college moment as her sophomore NCAAs, when teammate Nicole Marshall won the 200 fly in an A final with three other Violets in a watershed moment. She cites the IM titles of Williams’ Sophia Verkleeren as among her fondest memories. Not her individual titles or her downing records that were more than a decade old.
She’s even sounds bashful when the lens is turned to what might come next for her. She is, “for now, done, but I don’t want to say never.” She trained last summer with the Masters’ group at North Bay Aquatics with coach Don Swartz, who passed away in February. His legacy might tease the history major and aspiring teacher back to the water, but it would take some doing.
“He always talked to me about going to Olympic Trials,” she said. “So I don’t want to say never, but I think it would take a lot for me to get back in that pool, especially for long course.”
Even the individual legacy is not hers alone. She’s been part of Division III swimming getting faster, but others have pushed her as much as she’s pushed that progress, in her view.
What she will allow, though, is a blueprint for future generations of Violets, perhaps a sea change in which NYU cracks the D3 oligarchy and sticks around.
“The team achievements, I think, are so much more rewarding than any individual achievements,” she said. “The new people on the team only know the team as winners, which is something that my freshman year, we didn’t talk about. … So it leaves me really hopeful for what the team is going to be able to do in the next few years. I think they’re going to be a force for a while, and I think maybe could even establish themselves as one of those teams that passes around the title every few years.”