It won’t be long until Big Ten women’s swimming is back competing for top 5 spots at NCAA’s with teams from the SEC and Pac 12, not with the way this fall recruiting season has gone.
The Minnesota Golden Gophers have picked up another blue-chip recruit for their class of 2014: Brooke Zeiger from the Bluefish Swim Club has verbally committed.
Zeiger is one of these classic “so good, that she can swim a lot of races at the NCAA level and be successful.” Internationally, however, she looks like she will primarily be a 200 backstroker and IM’er (though, she surely shouldn’t be pigeonholed yet unless she and her coaches want to go that way.)
Like we’ve said with most of the Bluefish swimmers, Zeiger’s true value isn’t obvious until looking at her long course times. She has 11 long course cuts good for juniors-or-better, and 8 World Championship Trials cuts.
In long course, she’s been 2:03.6 in the 200 free and 4:14.7 in the 400 free; 1:02.9 and 2:11.5 in the 100 and 200 backstrokes; 1:12.2 and 2:33.2 in the 100 and 200 breaststrokes; and 2:14 and 4:42.8 in the 200 and 400 IM’s.
That leaves a whole lot of options for the Gophers to use her in at NCAA’s, including perhaps as the backstroker on the medley relays. Her impact at the Big Tens will be immediate, though, and the same is probably true for NCAA’s.
Minnesota’s fall recruiting class has really fallen into place. After several years of doing a great job in developing both elite recruits and just “good” recruits into significant contributors, it’s almost as if there’s a bit of a delayed recruiting response. The response is there, though, as they’ve picked up a monster class that includes Brooke Lorentzen, Danielle Nack, Rae Bullinger, McKenna Lynch, and now Zeiger. All of a sudden, the Gophers start to creep into the conversation for top 5 classes in the country as well, alongside conference competitors Michigan and Indiana.
Yards bests (keeping in mind, she’s probably multiple seconds better than all of these times):
- 200 free – 1:49.27
- 500 free -4:47.78
- 1000 free – 9:45.19
- 100 back – 57.80
- 200 back – 1:58.91
- 100 breast – 1:03.8
- 200 breast – 2:14.6
- 200 IM – 2:01.4
- 400 IM – 4:12.7
I was hoping she would look at Georgia!!
Her sister has done very very well at Minnesota; and it is funny because her sister is kind of the inverse swimmer to Brooke. Blake is an excellent sprint flyer and sprint freestyler and those are the areas I would say Brooke is lacking.
She had an awesome summer, can’t wait to see what kind of yard times she will throw down. Good luck to her and the gophers!!
200 back, 200 IM, 400 IM
Bluefish
It looks like Elizabeth Beisel!
She’s got a sister that swims there too, no?
That she does…forgot about that!
BOOSH.
Knowing something swimming-related that Brendan doesn’t know…this is the crowning achievement of my life.