2021 NCAA WOMEN’S SWIMMING & DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS
- When: Wednesday, March 17 – Saturday, March 20, 2021
- Where: Greensboro Aquatic Center / Greensboro, NC (Eastern Time Zone)
- Prelims 10 AM / Finals 6 PM (Local Time)
- Short course yards (SCY) format
- Defending champion: Stanford (3x) – 2019 results
- Streaming: ESPN3
- Championship Central
- Psych Sheets
- Live Results – Swimming
- Live Results – Diving
- Day 2 Prelims Heat Sheet
The first individual event of the 2021 Women’s Division I Swimming & Diving Championship wasn’t exactly a barnburner. This wasn’t too surprising, given that seed times were generally slower than were in previous years, but it was still a bit of a shock to see just how much easier it was, time-wise, to make the A or B final this year compared to the last few NCAAs.
Here’s a quick comparison of the 8th and 16th place time in prelims over the last three NCAAs, versus this morning.
| 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2021 | |
| 8th | 4:38.09 | 4:37.25 | 4:37.30 | 4:40.72 |
| 16th | 4:39.97 | 4:38.97 | 4:39.15 | 4:43.16 |
Going back even further, today’s 8th-place time of 4:40.72 would not have even scored in 2014, 2015 or 2016.
We’ll have to wait a few more events to see if this will be a trend across the meet, or if the 500 free proves to be an anomaly in just how much slower it got this year. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, invite times this year were slower across the board, due to some combination of teams not swimming, red shirts or deferrals, and training interruptions, so times probably won’t be as fast as previous years.
Still, it’s possible that training interruptions, such as Michigan swimmers having to quarantine for two weeks in late January and early February, had a greater impact on distance swimmers’ training than on those who focus on shorter events.
Another interesting wrinkle: only 4 of the 52 splashes this morning in this event resulted in swimmers going faster than their seed time, including only 1 in the top 8. In 2019, that number was 12 out of 61, including all of the top 5 swimmers in prelims, and 6 out of the top 8. In 2018 16 women out of 64 dropped time from seed, with the only swimmer in the top 8 who didn’t improve on her seed time was Katie Ledecky. So, while it’s not too unusual for non-scoring swimmers to fail to improve on their seed times, this morning’s events definitely saw more swimmers than normal who made the top 8 without improving on their seed times.
Unsurprisingly, but also worth noting — with only 4 swimmers improving from seed this morning, no one hit a lifetime best in prelims. All 4 swimmers who improved from seed had been faster in previous years.
In general, we’re starting to get a more emphatic answer to the question of how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is impacting times than we did at conference championship meets – which didn’t seem too out of the ordinary. One conclusion could be that the second rest of a double taper (even if that first taper was more of a quick drop taper) is being hit harder than the first one.
We’ll be keeping an eye on prelims all morning, and the rest of the meet, to see how things shake out over the next few days.
I, for one, am grateful that someone is here to tell us what’s happening, give us context.
Thanks swimswam, ignore the haters. Swimming is too soft sometimes. The real fans get it.
Did any of those ‘previous years’ had to deal with COVID?
Relax and enjoy the meet. And be thankful….
Swimmers might also have tapered more for their conference meets because NCAAs weren’t a certainty and/or they didn’t swim a fall invite to get cuts. Attempting a double taper on top of less training could partially explain it.
One thing people have to remember is how different training has been this past year. People have gone from thousands of yards 7 times a week, to 4-5 days a week with limited work. This year also doesn’t count as an eligibility year so results may not be as good as they were last year. Ps, some PAC-12 schools haven’t even began training until January .
Chad Sprinter can train 3000 yards a day for a month, max bench, and still taper to PB. I think the case for distance swimmers being more affected by training interruptions is valid but we’ll see what happens this week and the men next week. Definitely would be an interesting stats article
I do think that sprinters will be less affected than distance swimmers and men less than women. But as you said let’s see the rest of this meet and next week’s meet.
I think everyone is underestimating how draining and depressing and challenging the past 12 months of the pandemic has been on our athletes.
this, i think its easy to think every swimmer is ecstatic for the chance to compete at NCAAs-which is true- but a good majority have really struggled adapting to this new normal and are looking forward to the season ending because of how many rules/regulations theyve had to follow on top of training to be the very best while also being college students in a pandemic. no matter what times they go, they should just enjoy the experience, I also think so many different programs followed different covid protocols so who knows which teams were uninterrupted and what teams were interrupted. some schools required team shut downs with 1 case, others did not, hard to tell.
53 swims, one bested their seed time?
apologies, one DFS, so 52 swims – 1 faster than seed time
4 according to MeetMobile but yeah