50-meter breaststroke<\/a> at the USA Swimming National Championships, clocking a winning time of 26.65 to capture the title. He finished ahead of a competition that included heat favorite and breaststroke national champion Alexei Avakov and Olympian Michael Andrew. <\/p>\n\u201cAfter I won my race at nationals, I knew that I would be selected to the National Team,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
His 50-meter mark is the fourth best time in U.S. history and ranked 10th on the globe this year. <\/p>\n
During the 2025-26 season, Nguyen swept the breaststroke events at the Ivy League championships, claiming titles in both the 100-yard and 200-yard breaststroke.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the meet, he broke the DeNunzio Pool record and the previous program record held by 2026 Wharton and Engineering graduate and Olympian Matt Fallon. His performance earned him an automatic berth to the NCAA championships, where he finished 28th in the 100-yard and 26th in the 200-yard breaststroke. <\/p>\n
Nguyen joins Penn\u2019s lineage of historic breaststrokers from Fallon to 2012 College graduate Brendan McHugh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to Penn wanting to continue that legacy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI knew this school was where I needed to be to reach my goals. Even if those alumni aren\u2019t here with me right now, I feel deep support from them knowing what they\u2019ve done for this team. It\u2019s an honor to be able to follow in their footsteps.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Junior breaststroke specialist Watson Nguyen has been selected for USA Swimming\u2019s 2026-27 national team roster.\u00a0 Nguyen will be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-842511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}