By Yanyan Li on SwimSwam
Neither dirty doubles nor out-of-nowhere breaststroke success are new to Indiana men’s swimming. Three-time NCAA champions Brendan Burns established himself as the king of double sessions throughout his career, racing and seeing great success when racing either the 100 back/100 fly or 200 back/200 fly in one night at big meets. Meanwhile, Van Mathias became a sprint freestyler and breaststroker after years of struggling at NCAAs as a fly/IM specialist. After racing the 100 breast for the first time in college as a fifth year, he went on to place second in the event the 2023 NCAA Championships.
Indiana senior Finn Brooks, who placed 10th in the 100 fly (44.59), fourth in the 100 breast (50.50) and helped his team finish fifth in the 400 medley relay on Friday night, is a continuation of both Indiana trends. He ends his career with a best time of 49.94 in the 100 breast, being just one of five men to break the 50-second barrier.
Finn Brooks with the MEET RECORD
Men's 100 Breaststroke: 49.94#B1GSD x @IndianaSwimDive pic.twitter.com/zbTlFZ1eBm
— Big Ten Conference (@bigten) March 1, 2025
“I don’t know if I’ve completely wrapped my head around that,” Brooks said of going 49. “It’s definitely pretty cool.”
However, Brooks bloomed late in college, and once was the furthest thing from a breaststroker.
The Origin Story
Brooks came to Indiana as a relatively unknown recruit and a sprint free/fly specialist. During his freshman season, he couldn’t make a scoring roster, racing exhibition-only in the 50 free, 100 free and 100 fly at the 2022 Big Ten Championships. As a sophomore, he made huge strides and qualified for NCAAs in those same events but didn’t score individually. Breaststroke wasn’t a part of his serious repertoire until his junior season.
During their junior season, Brooks started racing the 50 breast at dual meet 200 medley relays solely because his team needed someone to step up. The moment of clarity came when Indiana raced at Louisville in February 2024, when he clocked a 22.62. Upon realizing his natural talent within his start, pullouts and turns, Indiana head coach Ray Looze put Brooks in the 100 breast that meet, where he went 51.34. From then onward, he was a non-negotiable breaststroker.
“He is just one of the most naturally gifted athletes I’ve ever met,” Burns said of Brooks. “He is top three strongest swimmers I’ve ever seen in a weight room, and it translates over to swimming very well, especially in sprinting.”
Brooks’ progress wasn’t linear. After finishing second at Big Tens in the 100 breast (51.30), he struggled at 2024 NCAAs in the same event, adding over a second and placing 32nd. He also reached the 100 fly ‘B’ final and finished 15th that same day, achieving his first-ever second swim at NCAAs. But the double session took a toll on him, limiting his ability to swim to his full potential.
Junior year unlocked a new talent in Brooks. But senior year was when he really took off. Over the course of a season, he improved from 19.37 to 18.86 in the 50 free, 44.84 to 44.59 in the 100 fly and a whopping 51.30 to 49.94 in the 100 breast, winning a Big Ten title in the latter event by over half a second. In just one season, he went from a fringe NCAA scorer in freestyle and butterfly to one of the best swimmers in the country across three strokes.
“Finn was not a blue chip recruit in high school. He was overlooked by a lot of guys, but we saw the potential in him,” Burns said. “We knew that he could be very, very, good. We just saw that frame that he had in high school. We knew that with our training and and a little bit of mentoring and coaching, he could be the swimmer he is today.”
Brooks also managed the Big Tens to NCAAs transition better this year. He hit a best time and set a school record in the 50 free, finishing 15th. And on his big night three, he tied his best time in the 100 fly ‘B’ final, finishing 10th. That didn’t hurt his 100 breast to the extent that it did last year, as he qualified for the ‘A’ final comfortably there and took fourth.
And Brooks still had one more swim left in him at night after his individuals, splitting a 50.45 100 breast on the 400 medley relay to finish his collegiate career.
“In order to do the double, you’ve got to grit your teeth and just push through the last event you’re doing,” Brooks said. “On the relay at the end [Friday night], I was so beat, and I was like, ‘I’m just gonna lay everything I have out.’ It was not great, it was very sloppy in my opinion, but I still went a decent time. It was also my last swim in college ever, so that was a part of [my mentality].”
Indiana Culture
And while the change in day 3 schedule, which moved the 100 fly before the 400 IM at the start of the session, gave Brooks more time between the 100 fly and 100 breast, his improvements in time and event management were caused by changes made way earlier.
During his senior season, Brooks started focusing on more sprint-oriented workouts in the fall rather than doing aerobic ones like in the past. He only added aerobic and threshold training into his regime in the spring — the lighter workload didn’t wear him out as much and allowed him to focus on more technical aspects of his sprint races, like his pull.
“I paced myself really well throughout the season,” Brooks said. “I tended to burn out toward the end of the year in my first three years of college, but this year, I paced it out a little better and had a really good end to my training.”
Despite Brooks and Mathias having similar career trajectories, Brooks thinks that their paths toward discovering breaststroke were a mere coincidence. In fact, despite having a faster best time than him, Brooks believes Mathias is more naturally talented in breaststroke. Brooks consistently trained breaststroke in practice but Mathias barely ever did when he was in the sprint group, and yet he still was the second-best 100 breaststroker in the nation in 2023.
Burns feels otherwise — he believes that both Brooks and Mathias’ paths were not by chance, but are a product of Indiana’s development culture.
“For both of them, it took a few years for them to really find what they were looking for and excelling at,” Burns said. “But once they did, they became some of the best swimmers. They’re the type of swimmers that any team would be lucky to have. We were grateful that our coaches, our development process allowed them to find their niche and thrive.”
Not only is Indiana culture shown through development, but it can also be displayed through the doubles legacy. That was most notably established with Burns, who won the 200 fly and 200 back in the same session at Big Tens twice and raced multiple individual events in a session at all four NCAA Championships he competed at. However, he says he wouldn’t have been as successful with these sessions if it weren’t for the encouragement and aerobic training from his coaches at Indiana.
After Burns graduated, Brooks is carrying on his legacy as an Indiana swimmer capable of pulling off double individual event sessions at NCAAs.
“There’s definitely a cultural aspect to the doubles. Everybody supports and gets behind the guys that are doing the doubles. They know how its kind of brutal,” Brooks said. “I guess maybe Burns set the precedent of the dirty double.”
The rise of swimmers like Brooks have been a big part of college swimming. However, with new roster limit rules forcing teams to only keep the cream of the crop, there could be fewer opportunities for swimmers like Brooks to slowly emerge over four years. Even if they may be seen more often on the DII and DIII levels, it may be more difficult for them to improve without the coaching and resources of Division I programs.
As the landscape of college swimming changes for better or for worse, stories like Brooks’ showcase the great things about the status quo, as well as what the sport could lose if that status quo is changed.
“Our team was founded on being gritty, being tough, being selfless to score points for the team. We’re a team that’s really known for developing people and taking those guys that other teams look over. We make them some of our pillars of the team, like a Finn Brooks,” Burns said. “So it’s just a shame that, you know I could obviously be wrong, but I think that’s going to go away very, very soon.”
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