Olympic silver medalist Claire Curzan recently announced on Instagram that she was transferring to the University of Virginia, joining a women’s swim team that has won three consecutive national championships.
In April, Curzan, who just finished her first year of collegiate swimming at Stanford University, said she’d be an “Olympic redshirt” during the 2023-24 season. (Athletes who redshirt maintain their spot on the roster, but cannot compete for the team. Olympic redshirting indicates a focus on training for the Olympics.) In July, she entered the transfer portal, officially indicating her intention to join a new team. By the end of the month, she’d committed to UVA.
It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, according to Curzan, and was influenced by her reflection on what she wanted this upcoming Olympic year. “Just knowing that I would be able to drive down to my parents whenever I wanted or they could come up and visit me, and also being a part of a really dominant swim program. I think it was just kind of a decision that I was able to make pretty quickly, and luckily things fell into place,” says the North Carolina native.
UVA Head Coach Todd DeSorbo says the amount of transfers, both at Virginia and across the entire NCAA, has increased since the onset of COVID-19. Because the pandemic affected the NCAA season, swimmers who competed that year were granted an additional year of eligibility. DeSorbo says this fifth-year opportunity “has opened up doors a lot because a lot of people are using that fifth year to do a grad school program. And that’s been advantageous to the athletes.”
While Curzan won’t compete for Virginia in the upcoming season, her past NCAA performance is promising. At the March women’s NCAA Division I championships, she earned 51 points—the fifth-most (three Hoos were ahead of her)—and was the meet’s 200-backstroke winner.
Curzan’s transfer follows a resume of high-profile competition in and out of the United States. At the Tokyo Olympics, she placed 10th in the 100-meter butterfly and helped team USA earn silver by competing in prelims for the women’s 4×100-meter medley relay. Curzan was also a gold medalist at both the 2022 World Championships and the 2022 Short Course World Championships. She joins a growing list of UVA’s international performers, including Olympic medalists Kate Douglass and Alex Walsh, as well as Gretchen Walsh and Maxine Parker—all of whom also competed at this summer’s World Championships.
This won’t be the first time DeSorbo coaches Curzan. During the delayed 2020 Olympics, DeSorbo, an Olympic assistant coach, worked with her. “It’s gonna be a pretty easy and seamless transition for her because she knows me and our coaching staff already really well,” he says. “She knows our team really well.”
Curzan has already been teammates with several UVA swimmers. She swam with Alex Walsh and Douglass, as well as 2017 grad Leah Smith and Emma Weyant (now at the University of Florida), as part of Team USA during international competition. During the 2022 World Championships, she and Douglass were both on the 4×100-meter freestyle relay that won bronze.
“It puts me at ease knowing that I’m joining a program where these girls are at such a high level that hopefully I’ll be able to rise to it. And Todd’s obviously great at cultivating excellence,” Curzan says. “So I think it’s definitely an exciting decision to make, and it eased my worries of transferring to a new program.”
