Stanford has landed its fourth top-20 recruit in the last 24 hours, getting a verbal commitment from #8 Hannah Kukurugya Monday night.
Kukurugya is a Junior World Championships bronze medalist in the 200 fly and a fast-riser in short course yards, and could very well turn out to be the best butterflyer in the high school class of 2017.
https://twitter.com/Hann_kuk/status/785642900558405634
She comes to Stanford out of Crown Point Swim Club and Crown Point High School in – you guessed it – Crown Point, Indiana. She’s a multi-faceted threat who can swim all four strokes and projects as a potential free relay factor in addition to her noticeable butterfly and IM prowess.
Kukurugya’s Top Times
All in short course yards unless otherwise specified.
- 100 fly: 53.44 (59.93 LCM)
- 200 fly: 1:55.64 (2:09.68 LCM)
- 200 free: 1:47.10
- 200 IM: 1:58.59 (2:16.21 LCM)
- 400 IM: 4:18.56
Kukurugya is the latest piece in a recruiting windfall for Stanford. Sunday night, the Cardinal got #10 Grace Zhao, then Monday picked up #4 Brooke Forde, #12 Ashley Volpenhein and Kukurugya.
No other school has more than two swimmers verbally committed from our top 20 list.
Kukurugya will join All-American Janet Hu for one year at the Farm, along with NCAA scorer Lindsey Engel in what is starting to shape up as a historically talented roster for the Card.
Relevant:
https://thinkprogress.org/stanford-will-now-be-free-to-all-students-from-families-that-earn-less-than-125-000-per-year-72f63bc3a96e#.635izssbw
This is kind of the perfect-storm era of recruiting for Stanford. In addition to all of the school’s built in advantages (weather, academics, campus, etc), Meehan and the Stanford swimmers were the darling of US Olympics, and everybody has seen the incredible rise of Stanford’s women’s program over the last few years.
As these things go, some of these recruits will not drop time when they get to college. There is the balance of social life, academics, plateau, being away from home, and just plane burnout, and not everyone can be a star on any team. Eventually, other coaches will be able to recruit against Stanford by saying, “it didn’t work out for that swimmer, maybe they’re not the… Read more »
This isn’t the golden age of college swimming it is college swimming nearing the end. The “endowment” payment system should be disallowed for athletes. With an unequal economic platform some schools will always be at a disadvantage. Any sport where competition is lacking has trouble. Womens college swimming is no exception. How does a school like UVA compete with Stanford ? The tuition is 60K per year at UVA but there is no endowment, therefore they will never be able to beat Stanford because economically they cannot attract the best recruits. Also, I do not believe that Stanford holds every one that is admitted to the same academic standard. Ability to contribute to the “endowment” and or status in society… Read more »
Why is everybody so depressed? Two years ago Cal had a much better recruiting class. It didn’t wipe out competition. Stanford had very little money available for recruiting this year and we should appreciate parents paying most of the money to participate in the program. Despite rigorous academic requirements (more than 30 and 4.0) they still manage to get top recruits. But the school is though and it always overwhelms some athletes. If you look at their roster you can see that they have quite a few swimmers who cannot swim their HS times anymore. About the soft money, they still have to adhere to Bylaw 15.02.4.3.
Although this year the strength of the class may be better than… Read more »
Just curious, do you have any “inside” knowledge that Bayer will commit to Stanford? I have also suspected Bayer will head to Stanford. Many swim kids from the DC area choose top academic schools, and recently they have been heading to the west coast (Hu, Seliskar, Byrnes, Ledecky, now Isabella Rongione, Matthew Hirchberger and Allison Goldblatt- all of whom train/ed with the same club team as Bayer.) Plus with her besties Byrnes and Kukurugya there I’m sure Stanford will be even more attractive.
?? UVA has an endowment of $7 Billion. Not quite in the same league as Stanford, but they are not exactly “hurting” in Charlottesville.
You don’t know what you are talking about.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Anyone remember when Cal signed Missy, Vredeveld, Celina Li and Marina Garcia to join their other stars? They have only won 1x since then. Stanford recruited a good class, just like they have the past few years. Things go in cycles.
It’s not about endowments, etc. As noted above, if your daughter has the opportunity to A) get a Stanford degree and B) swim for a team that has a chance to win a lot of Championships – it would be hard to turn down. Not to mention Meehan is really starting to prove himself as an excellent coach.
This is not the end of college swimming, good God… Read more »
Alberto Mestre commited too!
WTF STANFORD. PURE DOMINATION FOR YEARS
Stanford is lit
Since Stanford is a private school can they offer more than 14 athletic scholarships and call them some other type of aid? Can “sponsors”, “boosters”, or “donors” pay for athletes to attend ? Seems like a lot of out of state people are going to Stanford which is academically very hard to get in to. Cost of attendance is about 60k with room and board. With the roster they already have it would seem like there wouldn’t be any athletic money available. Maybe they are all wealthy and can afford 250k for college. Also, a lot of these new recruits are not going to be swimming on the relays with the current roster. Going to swim the PAC 12 dual… Read more »
Stanford is very challenging to get into, but once your in they give a lot of financial aid. They don’t need to have boosters pay for anything because it all comes from the endowments that they already have. You can look up how much at https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/calculator/input.html for example I tried a family of 4 with $150,000 dollar income and got half of it paid for based on the calculator. Huge recruiting advantage.
Yes, most likely all of these top 20 recruits receive “substantial” aid in one form or another. Per NCAA rules, D1 women’s swim teams can only give out a total of 14 (9 for men) full athletic scholarships. These 14 agh-scholarships can be divided up, but max 14-total max. However, there are other forms of assistance – state & federal financial aid, academic merit, and institutional aid from the school – that do not count towards the 14 scholarships. The institutional aid is where a private school like Stanford w/ a huge endowment can provide a lot more assistance to athletes than the mere 14 athletic scholarship.
So, you can have swimmerA on 50% pure athletic scholarship and swimmerB… Read more »
-No, private colleges cannot work around athletic scholarship limits that easily, the NCAA would see right through that, lol. However, all Stanford students are eligible for financial aid if their family’s income is below a certain level.
-Ledecky has definitely lost races, just not in International competition representing Team USA.
-College swim programs folding are due to athletic directors who don’t care about swimming and who want to save money, not because of the amount of swimming talent in the top few programs.
-The top recruits in college swimming have always mostly gone to a handful of top programs. There is not some earth-shattering change going on here. Heck, Stanford signed four top 20 recruits last year as well.
I have to agree with Joe.
Nothing against these amazing girls or Stanford, a fantastic institution, but how do they get such talent at one school? As a parent of a past top 10 recruit I know all the ins and outs of athletic scholarship percentages and academic aid, etc. I also know the cost to the parents after all the athletic and academic aid has been granted. Stanford is an extremely expensive college, and they have arguably one of the best rosters ever. To be able to then go out and get 4 of the top 12 girls in the country has me wondering how they are doing it, or why the other colleges can’t seem to figure… Read more »
This is hilarious. I get it when it’s high stakes like college football; sure some shady stuff goes on at the southern schools at least. Maybe at Stanford Football too, I don’t know. But to say or imply that it’s happening in SWIMMING is ridiculous. As a parent of a “top 10” recruit, are you honestly telling me that if your kid got into Stanford that you wouldn’t do everything you could to send them there?
It’s been the favourite school of parents and HS seniors for something like 4 straight years according to the Princeton Review. Incredible campus (biggest campus in the world), academics (top 5 in the world in any major), athletics (22 straight Director’s Cups), and… Read more »
Hilarious, really? Implying? Not implying anything, wondering how it’s possible….yes. Have you been through the process? Have you seen the quality of schools that are willing to offer great swimmers full rides?
Yes, I 100% agree that Stanford is the BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, but don’t kid yourself and think that they are the ONLY world. As a parent, looking at a minimum of $125,000 for 4 years of a Stanford education (and an awesome swimming school, no doubt) is hard to say, “sure, no problem”, when some of the other equally impressive academic schools are offering full rides (and yes, not as good of a swimming program). Maybe you live in Palo Alto and $125K seems like a no… Read more »
I agree. I thought you were implying there was something else going on. My bad.
There are plenty of families in the swimming world with money. The net cost for a year at Stanford is about 65K. Lets say you need to come up with half. You no longer have to pay for your kid’s local team and travel, so there is 10 to 15K right there. Your kid can do a 5K student loan. Most people in the swimming world can swing 10K on a home line of credit for 4 years. There you are.
Remember when Phelps was invincible in ’08? Chad le Clos and Joe Schooing had posters of him on their wall, working harder than ever to some day beat him. Remember when Franklin was invincible in ’13? All of the sudden female freestylers and backstrokers from all over the world stepped up their game to be like Missy Franklin. Now, Stanford seems to be invincible. This will push colleges such as UGA, UVA, Texas A&M and Cal to not let Stanford get too far ahead, and eventually, catch up to them. Sometimes a “talent overload” can be a good thing. Welcome to the golden age of women’s college swimming.
Missy dominate in backstroke in ’13 but not so much in freestyle though, ledecky 2013-16 is a much bigger domination than missy.
Also it’s not like stanford is so far away in front of their challenger there is still cal, georgia.
They are just like texas men now, in their golden days.
Their roster was pretty small last year..under 20 swimmers. Now a bigger freshman class and the main difference between them and say usc or cal is that they have the super elite swimmers. Its so hard to get accepted there I wonder how fast the swimmer has to be for them to help a swimmer get accepted
The academic bar will be lower when you have a hook like swimming. This is true for most of the academic elite schools. Maybe not quite as low as for the football team, but lower than the average for the school. Looks like every year Stanford fills several spots with Top-100ish swimmers that have very good though maybe not stellar academic credentials…credentials which probably would not get admissions without the swimming hook. My guess, Top 100 will probably be walk-ons or get very little assistance, their reward is admission to Stanford.
I’m curious to know if Stanford has something like the Ivy League Academic Index, where they shoot to have the average academic profile for the swim team be within… Read more »
The men’s swim team had a 3.47 GPA last year… Almost all classes are graded on a curve at Stanford so they’re competing against the entire student body for grades.
I was in the stands at Pac 12s last year. Their senior class had:
– two Computer Science majors
– one Environmental Engineering major
– one Chemical Engineering major
– two Mechanical Engineering majors
– the diver studied Human Biology
Gray Umbach won Pac 12 Scholar Athlete of the year with a 3.99 GPA in Chem Eng, and wasn’t even the highest on the team! Another senior Ryan Arata (Mechanical Eng) had a 4.02. Tell me more about the lowered academic standards…….
Say what you will about the Men’s team’s performance the last few years, but Scott and Ted recruited excellent young men, who were extremely focused both in and out of the pool.
The bar for ADMISSIONS is what I’m referring to above and is most certainly lower than the bar for not-recruited applicants. This is common practice at all the elite schools. Who wants a school of only 36 ACT’s and 4.0’s?!? Better to bring in students w/ other gifts, like being a world class swimmer on top of being a solid student. I have no doubt that once admitted Stanford does everything they can to make sure these kids succeed. That’s what makes it a great school.
As someone that went through the process at Stanford very recently with 2 athletes I coach I can say in my experience the bar is not lowered for admissions. We thought that might be the case but the standards are very strict. Congrats to these student athletes who recently committed to a great school and program!
I am a Stanford grad. I know admissions well. Basically, Stanford does not want to fill the school with only 4.5 GPA 36 ACT students. It would be a pretty boring place. Athletes have a lot of the qualities that Stanford is looking for: Intense personal drive, the ability to work hard over a long period of time, and an expectation of success. So yes, athletes sometimes do get in with lower SAT’s and GPA’s than students who do not have a “hook.” The lowered standards are greatest for football, although most football players are decent students. In the olympic sports, I know of kids getting in with SAT’s in the 2000 to 2100 range. Maybe if you are a… Read more »
Bar not lowered. You have no clue what you’re talking about. And as a parent of a top recruit who has a 4.5 GPA it IS possible and not that uncommon for great swimmers to also be brilliant.
@ Annoyed Not sure who you are responding to, but if it was me, my post is 100% accurate. I know someone who works in admissions. Now, when I say “lowered,” it refers only to how low admissions is willing to go if you are a phenom elsewhere in your life. Every parent of an elite athlete knows that 25 hours a week committed to a sport takes away from the time you can put into academics, and admissions recognizes that as well. Low for Stanford is not low for anyone else. And sure, there are straight A student athletes with superior SAT’s. But there are some kids who get a boost from their D1 sports ability.
@fatherifagymnast, I was not annoyed at your comment. I value your knowledge on this topic. I just think it’s wrong to take away from these kids who got accepted to this amazing school. They publish their admissions and based on the extremely high percentage of students who have over 3.8 ( somewhere over 90%) their standards are very high athlete or not.
You are correct. Anyone who gets into Stanford is a very good student. Many are right at the top. The take home point is that Stanford looks at each individual applicant and makes a decision about what they offer to the school. If you are a superb athlete, Stanford is going to give your application a good look, but you better be producing in the classroom. Most kids cannot get in. My “gymnast” kid is being recruited elsewhere, but Stanford is not an option. Too bad he doesn’t have my daughter’s grades. They would have taken him if he did.
That last post was directed to swimmer 1.
Props.
Of course sport like swimming is predictable like gymastics, track and field especially running it’s much different than sports that use ball like football, basketball, soccer etc because it’s hardly involve LUCK, but that is what stand out separates them. Swimming, running is a such a fair sport that what is your condition in that race, that will make the result.
Did you also complain when phelps dominate in 03-08 or ledecky 13-16 ??
If yes than it’s stupid
So We have to make phelps, ledecky, hosszu, sjostrom as example harder dominate because they have such a supreme talent. Lol
Also you say that why they have to show up if they know they wont win. That is their problem, they have to step up their game or just accept reality.
Stanford won’t even score in 2018, all hype
thanks, that cracked me up!