2013 Swammy Awards: Club Team of the Year

For the second year in a row, SwimMAC Carolina made the deliberations for the Club Team of the Year Swammy easier by putting together an outstanding season across the boards.

SwimMAC is just plain good. They’re deep – about the deepest high-level club around, winning the USA Swimming Club Excellence Title by a 12000-point margin. SwimMAC caps were all over the finals at the recent Winter Junior Nationals, with multiple swimmers placing in the A finals in multiple events – the SwimMAC girls were the highest-scoring girls team by almost 200 points after winning the girls title at summer Juniors as well.

And they’re not just deep. CEO and coach David Marsh’s crew has some of the top youth swimmers in the nation, including Kathleen Baker, who represented Team USA at Duel in the Pool. In 2013 SwimMAC has broken NAG relay records, placed multiple swimmers on the junior national team and helped a bunch of seniors sign with top-tier Division I schools. It’s hard to ask much more of a swim club, making SwimMAC a clear candidate for Club of the Year.

And all this is without even mentioning SwimMAC’s huge contingent of pros. This award is really about the age-groupers, and SwimMAC clearly wins that category. The fact that the club also serves as home for one of the better groups of post-grads in the nation is just icing on the cake. SwimMAC has also brought a fun aspect of club swimming – relays and relay records – to the post-grad game in a way few other U.S. clubs have, combining pros onto relays to chase American and U.S. Open records like they did most recently at Winter Nationals.

SwimMAC has a whole host of coaches involved with its operation, but special congratulations has to go to CEO David Marsh and senior coaches Russ Kasl and Pam Swander.

Honorable Mention:

• Nation’s Capital Swim Club – NCAP has been a great and balanced program this year, with studs on both the boys and girls side and a roster of legitimate age group stars like Katie Ledecky and Andrew Seliskar. Cassidy Bayer broke a 30-year old National Age Group Record. Janet Hu has broken several. They’ve been on a NAG relay record tear as of late and their collection of junior stars even sparkled against the world-class competition at Winter Nationals. In fairness, NCAP is a massive program that has a significant pool of swimmers from which to pull swimmers. If clubs produced better materials on who trains at which site, we’d drill down further and count each site as a separate ‘club’ for purposes of this award, but as of now, there’s no feasible way to do that.
• Dynamo Swim Club – In terms of overall scoring at Junior Nationals, Dynamo was the dominant force of 2013. They were the top overall point-scorers at both summer and winter juniors and also had strong showing at various meets over the year. The trio of Litherland boys were a huge part of that effort.
• Scottsdale Aquatic Club – 2013 was a big year for Scottsdale, which achieved USA Swimming gold-medal status for the first time ever and finished in the top 10 in team scoring at Winter Juniors with a relatively small roster of swimmers. Scottsdale also powered Ryan Hoffer’s fantastic NAG record-breaking season and contributed to his continuing development as a bright future star for American male sprinting.
• King Aquatic Club – The King Aquatic Club was one of the big players this year in the National Age Group relay records. They got their work done in multiple ages and mutliple genders – from Ethan Dang at the young end to Thomas Anderson and the teen boys, to the 17-18 girls that closed the year with a National Age Group Record in the 200 yard medley relay.