University of Pittsburgh Athletics
Dominic Giordano's Moment He Didn't See Coming
8/24/2026 3:28:00 PM | General, Men's Swimming
Dominic Giordano came out of the water and didn't know what he'd done.
It wasn't even his best dive of the meet — not close, by his own account. A front two-and-a-half somersault with two twists, the kind of dive he'd thrown a hundred times in practice.
He climbed out, dripping, and made his way over to his coach, Julian Krug, expecting nothing more than a nod and a note for next time. Instead, Krug told him he'd just won a national championship.
Giordano didn't believe him.
Three divers still had to compete. Krug didn't care. He'd already run the numbers in his head, the way he always did, tracking scores in real time while everyone else waited for the board to update. He told Giordano it didn't matter. Then the last divers went, and Giordano's name was still No. 1.
"He just goes, 'You just won an NCAA championship.' I was like, 'No, I didn't,'" Giordano said. "I wasn't super focused on the outcome. That's how diving meets worked for me. That's how I competed so well. I need everyone to do well. I'm gonna perform my best, and if I'm performing my best, and everyone else performs their best, then great."
That was March 2016, and it made Giordano the first men's swimmer or diver in Pitt history to win an NCAA championship, taking the 3-meter title and adding All-America honors on 1-meter the same year.
He'd go on to become a three-time ACC champion, sweep 3-meter in 2016 and 2017, win platform in 2015, and leave Pitt holding every diving record in the book — 1-meter, 3-meter and platform.
The youngest inductee in this year's Hall of Fame class got there by way of a road that didn't run straight through Pitt at all.
Giordano grew up around the program before he ever competed in it. Krug and his wife, Doe, coached the club team that trained out of Pitt's pool, and Giordano spent his high school years learning Krug's coaching style inside and out. When it came time to pick a college, Pitt was on the list. Giordano didn't choose it. He chose Florida State instead, and six months later, he knew he'd made a mistake.
"'No, Pitt's the spot. I gotta, I gotta go back,'" he remembers telling himself.
Krug welcomed him back without hesitation, and the two picked up a relationship that had always worked.
"It was just a natural kismet type of thing," Giordano said, "He understood how my brain worked and knew how to push me, and I just responded to his coaching style very, very well.
That relationship got tested fast. The club circuit Giordano grew up in ran four or five meets a year. College diving ran from September to March, meet after meet, with no real break. His first NCAA Championships appearance was a "disaster." He wasn't physically or mentally ready for a season that long, and it showed.
But Giordano has never handled failure quietly. He hates it enough that it sharpens him. He spent the next year figuring out exactly what had gone wrong and rebuilding his approach from the ground up, and part of what changed was how he competed.
Instead of blocking out the scoreboard and the noise around him, the way most divers do, he found he needed the opposite — watching his teammates, cheering, staying loose for hours and then locking in for the ten seconds that mattered.
"I need to stay focused for like 10 seconds, and then I can come out of the competition," he said.
It's what carried him through that 2016 final without him even realizing what he'd built.
Springboard wasn't supposed to be his event, either. He always assumed he'd end up a platform diver, and platform came easily and fast. But somewhere in that same stretch, 1-meter and 3-meter clicked in a way he still can't fully explain. He got stronger, more stable, more sure of the board under his feet. Platform had come naturally. Springboard he had to work for, and that turned out to be the one that stuck.
By his senior year, the nerves that once wrecked him were gone. ACCs landed at the same Georgia Tech pool where he'd won his national title the year before, and that familiarity settled him before he'd even climbed the ladder.
In 2017, he earned the title of the Most Valuable Male Diver award at ACCs. It was a recognition that meant something specific to him, coming from coaches who'd watched him all season.
"We were all seeing each other, coaches, other divers, other teams throughout the entire season," Giordano said. "These other coaches that have seen me through the year dive and progress. It just kind of felt like a bunch of aunts and uncles were recognizing me. It kind of felt like family being like, 'Yeah, Dom, good job.'"
Giordano lives across the country now, far enough from Pittsburgh that his own history there rarely comes up. He's said the accomplishments didn't fully register until other people started reminding him what they meant.
When he thinks about the records still standing in his name, he describes it as something split down the middle — relief that the work held up, and a nagging sense that he could have pushed harder to get there.
But more than anything there's a profound feeling of gratitude and hope for the future of the program.
"I love having my records up there," Giordano said. "But records are made to be broken. I'm excited for the day that a Pitt male athlete breaks my records."
