2019 Women’s NCAAs: How Did Our Top 20 Recruits Perform As Freshmen?

2019 WOMEN’S DIVISION I NCAA CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Wednesday, March 20th – Saturday, March 23rd
• Lee & Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center — Austin, Texas
• Prelims 9 a.m./Finals 5 p.m. (Central Time)
• Defending Champion: Stanford (2x) – 2018 results
• Championship Central
• Psych Sheet
• Live Results

We’ve already done a deep dive into our recruiting archives, looking at how the top 20 recruits from the high school class of 2015 did after four NCAA seasons. Now it’s time to look back at a more recent recruit ranking: the current year’s freshmen, whom we ranked in the spring of 2017, then re-ranked one year later after the close of their high school careers.

Relevant links:

• Top 20 recruits, high school class of 2018 (original rank as of May 31, 2017)
• Top 20 recruits re-rank, high school class of 2018 (ranked on June 5, 2018)

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.

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

• Taylor Ruck is pretty clearly the early winner here, scoring more than double what any other ranked athlete did this year.
• By contrast, the rest of Stanford’s loaded class were solid, but not eye-popping in NCAA points. It is impressive, though, that all of Stanford’s 7 athletes among these top 23 scored NCAA points as rookies.
• Only three of our top 10 didn’t score as freshmen. Two didn’t compete: Erica Sullivan will focus on open water and defer her enrollment until after the 2020 Olympics. Eva Merrell took a redshirt season and has recently opened up about her medical struggles, including Bradycardia and an eating disorder.
• Emma Muzzy didn’t score at NCAAs, but would have if she’d repeated her ACC times at nationals.
• The only two of our top 20 not to earn individual NCAA invites (besides the two absent ones explained above) were Kopenski and Lee.
• Of our honorable mentions, NC State’s Kylee Alons looks like one to watch – she scored the fifth-most points of any of our ranked recruits.

Unranked Recruits

And of course, we’ll include everyone’s favorite part: which unranked recruits scored NCAA points as freshmen, both domestic up-and-comers and international prospects who competed as freshmen this year.

Domestic:

• Isabel Ivey jumps into this class, though she was technically the #1 recruit in the class of 2019. But Ivey graduated early and joined Cal this year, putting up more points than any domestic freshman except Ruck.
• This was a good freshman class, with four unranked recruits scoring double-digit points as freshmen.

International:

• This is also a huge class internationally. Maggie MacNeil is actually the second-highest scorer, and three of the top four scorers would be internationals if you count Ruck, who technically competes for Canada internationally, but only made our ranked list because of her background in club swimming in the United States.
• NC State’s Sophie Hansson is anther 30+ scorer in a fantastic freshman class for the Wolfpack.
• This is an outstanding class in breaststroke, where Hansson and Hulkko both scored most of their points.

More recruiting rank analysis:

Women’s:

• Revisiting recruiting ranks: High school class of 2015
• Re-Ranking the recruiting classes: Collegiate class of 2016-2019
• All recruits, Classes of 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 (coming soon)

Men’s:

• Revisiting recruiting ranks: High school class of 2015 (coming soon)
• Re-Ranking the recruiting classes: Collegiate class of 2016-2019 (coming soon)
• Revisiting recruiting ranks: High school class of 2018 (coming soon)
• All recruits, Classes of 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 (coming soon)