2021 Men’s NCAAs: How Did Our Top 20 Recruits Perform As Freshmen?

We’ve already done a deep dive into our recruiting archives, looking at how the top 20 recruits from the high school class of 2017 did after four NCAA seasons. Now it’s time to look back at a more recent recruit ranking: the current year’s freshmen, the first class we officially scouted from their sophomore years through their senior seasons of high school:

Relevant links:

• Way-Too-Early Sophomore Ranks, Class of 2020 Boys
• Junior Ranks, Class of 2020 Boys
• Senior Re-Ranks, Class of 2020 Boys

Naturally, this analysis has a far smaller sample size than our reports from the past two days, so it’s much more difficult to read too much into these numbers. Still, it’s useful to look at which first-year NCAA swimmers had the best performances relative to their recruiting ranks.

As always, our notes on this data:

• The data included is only individual scoring at NCAAs. That’s not an exact measure of an athlete’s contribution to a program: many of these swimmers (and others not listed) were relay scorers at NCAAs, scored significant points at conference meets and provided great leadership and culture-building for their programs. This data isn’t a perfect analysis of the best recruits – it’s merely a quick look at the data we can compile.
• A college swimming career includes four years of eligibility, and sometimes more. Revisiting scoring after one year is an incomplete analysis of a swimmer’s career – this is not the final word on any of these prospects, and we will revisit this data over the next three seasons to get a more complete evaluation.

The ranks listed below are from our re-rank last summer – they are not current ranks of NCAA athletes. We also do not rank international athletes as recruits, as it’s hard to predict if and when they’ll come to the U.S., and which class with which to include them.

TOP 20 RANKED RECRUITS

HM=Honorable mention

The hits:

• This was an early-impact class – something we’d been excited about since we started evaluating this crew as sophomores. Every swimmer in our top 20 earned an NCAA invite as a freshman. That’s very difficult to do on the men’s side, where older and stronger swimmers typically take up an especially large share of NCAA invites and scoring.
• We had two redshirts in the mix, and just five of the 26 in our final ranks missed NCAA invites as rookies.
• The bulk of the scoring was concentrated in the top 7. It was actually #5 overall recruit Destin Lasco who led the class in scoring. Lasco finished in the top three in all three (200 IM, 100 back, 200 back) of his individual events.
• #1 recruit Carson Foster wasn’t far behind with 45 points. We noted how good this class was in the IMs, and that was no joke: Foster, Lasco and David Johnston all scored in the IMs as freshmen.
• Johnston was a great pickup as the #16 recruit – distance swimmers are especially volatile in our ranks, because a great mile can score big, but can also be wiped to zero points with one bad swim. Johnston was outstanding, scoring the 7th-most of any athlete in the class (international recruits and divers included).
• Alabama’s Matt King scored well and could have scored way more if not for a DQ in the 50 free.
• One swimmer in this class has already won an NCAA title individually: it’s #3 Jake Magahey, who won the 500 free.
  • From our 2020 re-rank: “Finding an NCAA scoring-level 500 freestyler out of high school is extremely rare – we tend to see much more development in that event at the college level. Magahey’s 4:12 stands up extremely well compared to senior-year times from the top recruits we’ve ever ranked: Townley Haas (4:14.1), Grant Shoults (4:12.8), Sean Grieshop (4:15.5), and Drew Kibler (4:14.4).”
  • That turned out to be a better predictor than even we thought at the time, with Magahey beating Kibler, Grieshop, and Shoults head-to-head while going under Haas’s old American record.

The misses:

• Both Michigan prospects were our highest-ranked recruits to miss scoring individually. Some of that may have come down to how much their program focused on Big Tens vs NCAAs. Davis would have scored in the 200 back had he held up his season-best. Mitchell would have scored in the 500 and 1650 frees. Both were still key contributors on scoring relays.

Other:

• Some athletes will have to wait a year for a clearer picture. Ethan Heasley was seeded to score in two events, but was scratched to get Texas under the NCAA roster limit. USC’s Ben Dillard took a redshirt season. Harvard’s Arik Katz didn’t compete as the entire Ivy League canceled sports in the pandemic.

UNRANKED RECRUITS

And of course, we’ll include everyone’s favorite part: which unranked recruits earned NCAA invites and projected to score points this season – both domestic up-and-comers and international pickups.

DOMESTIC:

• A very short list here so far. The time progressions are the fun part with these recruits, so here goes:
  • Charlie Clark was 4:25.7/15:07 at the time of our senior re-rank. He went 4:17.7/14:40.7 for Ohio State.
  • Noah Nichols was one of our top breaststrokers just outside the top 20 – we included him in our “best of the rest” section with times of 53.7/1:58.0. As a freshman, he went 51.3/1:52.9.

INTERNATIONAL:

• Bjorn Seeliger was a big get for California – he actually leads the class with 2 relay national titles after one year. (Lasco and Foster each have one apiece). Seeliger is the #4 overall scorer in the class.
• Youssef Ramadan likely would have been a much bigger scorer had he not been DQ’d out of his best event, the 100 fly. Virginia Tech did extremely well internationally with Ramadan and Carles Coll Marti.

Diving:

• Noah Duperre looked like the most impactful freshman in the nation for one day, placing second in a Texas 1-2 on 1-meter. But high school divers are usually more accustomed to 1-meter than the 3-meter or platform events, and Duperre’s scoring dropped off a little. Still, he scored the 7th-most points of any freshman in this class.

Archives: Revisiting Recruit Ranks