ISL Draft To Begin June 29: Full Order Revealed, Including Rookie-Only Round

International Swimming League teams have begun retaining their top athletes from last year. Starting next Tuesday, teams will retain up to ten more athletes before the drafting officially begins.

We’ve got the fully-updated draft order, plus a layout of all the personnel moves to come in the next week.

ISL Draft Process

1. First-5s

• Each team retains five swimmers from its protection pool.

These happened earlier this week. You can find each team’s retained swimmers here, or below:

2. Draft-day retaining (Tuesday, June 29)

On draft day (currently expected to be next Tuesday, June 29), each team retains up to ten more swimmers from its protection pool, in this order:

• Each team retains 4 swimmers
• Each team retains 3 swimmers
• Each team retains 2 swimmers
• Each team retains 1 swimmer

3. First-Round Rookie Picks (Tuesday, June 29)

This was not part of the original announcement of the draft process, but was revealed on the SwimSwam podcast last week.

• Each team selects one rookie from the draft pool
  • Teams pick in reverse order of last year’s team finish, so the Aqua Centurions will pick first
  • Teams can only select rookies – not swimmers who are a part of any team’s protection pool.
    • Swimmers who have competed in past years – but were not part of any team’s protection pool – are also considered “rookies” and can be picked here. That includes names like Kasia Wasick. You can see the ISL’s full list of “rookies” here.

4. Fan Vote (From June 29-30)

After that, fans will be able to vote for one more swimmer to be retained to each team.

The swimmer must be in that team’s protection pool. In order to vote, fans will have to (1) register on the ISL platform and (2) purchase a subscription to stream either the full ISL season, or one team’s specific matches.

Each registered fan will get one vote to cast for one team to retain a swimmer from 2020.

5. Swimmer Draft (Wednesday, June 30)

After that, all unretained players join the draft pool, and teams can start drafting from the collection of rookies and unretained veterans.

Teams will have just 60 seconds to make their picks. If a team misses the deadline, they’ll be jumped in the draft order.

The lowest-finishing teams getting multiple picks before the top finishers get one. The format is below. We’ll plug in the actual teams for a full draft order at the bottom of this post:

After that, the remaining swimmers in the draft pool are available to sign as free agents.

Overall Draft Order

• The draft order is set up to try to promote some parity in a league where there’s been very little of it. Outside of the rookie-only picks at the top, the bottom-finishing Aqua Centurions and DC Trident will get 5 picks each before the top two teams from last year (Cali Condors & Energy Standard) get their first pick.
• Including the rookie picks, the Aqua Centurions will start the draft with overall picks #1, #11, #13, #17, and #23 – that’s a quarter of the picks in the first 25. Ignoring the rookie-only picks, Aqua will have three of the first seven picks among the unretained veterans on the board and the remainder of the rookie field.