MPSF Will Run Timed-Finals Only for Conference Championship Meet

Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) – Men and Women

• Wednesday, February 17 – Saturday, February 20, 2021
  • Diving Tuesday, February 16 – Wednesday, February 17, 2021
• Cal Poly Anderson Aquatics Center – San Luis Obispo, CA (Pacific Time Zone)
• Defending Champion: Hawaii men (2x) & Hawaii women (4x) (results)
• Live results
• Live Video
• Championship Central
• Timeline
• Psych Sheets

The Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) has released the psych sheets for its 2021 men’s and women’s swimming & diving conference championship meets.

The event will be whittled down from the normal field with 7 women’s teams and 5 men’s teams competing this season after UCSD announced a few weeks back that it was canceling the program’s entire swimming & diving season. The Tritons finished 4th out of 6 men’s teams and 5th out of 8 women’s teams at last year’s championship meet.

Another wrinkle to this year’s meet is that the entire meet will be swum as timed finals, and there will be separate men’s and women’s sessions (aside from the brief opening day of the meet, which features only the two relay events). The women will swim each morning starting at 10AM Pacific Time, while the men will swim each afternoon starting at 3:30PM Pacific Time.

In digging through the psych sheets, the first thing that jumps out is that the University of the Pacific women, under second-year head coach Katelyne Herrington, haven’t entered an 800 free relay for the meet. That comes in spite of a minimum of 24 points just for finishing the relay legally. The Pacific women finished 7th out of 8 teams at the 2020 MPSF Championship meet with 234.50 points. That put them 58.5 points behind Cal Poly for 6th place.

There are also many swimmers with high seed potential missing from the psych sheets. It’s been hard to this point to peg down rosters for MPSF teams, with many of them having very few meets prior to the conference championship events.

UCSB, for example, is without 2 of the expected 3 returning legs of their defending conference champion 800 free relay. While that relay’s leadoff leg, sophomore Zoe Cosgrove, is racing this week, senior Elena England (on the roster still) and senior Emily Boggess (not on the roster still) aren’t on the psych sheets.

Boggess is the defending conference champion in the 200 free individually.

Hawaii’s Kionna Clayton, who was due to be a senior this year, also isn’t entered at the meet. She’s the defending conference champion in the 100 breaststroke who swam 1:00.56 last year and the defending champion in the 200 breaststroke after a 2:11.59 last year. She is no longer on the Hawaii roster.

Similarly on the men’s side, the defending conference champion in the 50 free, BYU junior-to-be Jared Shaw, won’t swim at this year’s meet. He was an NCAA qualifier last year, though that meet was ultimately canceled because of the onrushing coronavirus pandemic.

That leaves a big spint showdown between BYU senior Connor Stirling and Hawaii senior Aukai Lileikis, a former Cal Bear.

BYU will also be without last year’s MPSF runner-up Josue Dominiguez.

UCSB’s Jolen Griffin, the defending champion in the men’s 100 back, is also absent from the psych sheets.

Other examples of big absences include the top 6 finishers in the men’s 200 free from last year’s MPSF Championship meet (some due to UCSD scratching, some due to graduation).

Many seed times don’t appear in the official NCAA times database and are likely from prior seasons or unpublished intrasquad meets. But, based on seed times as entered, below is how a meet that went exactly to psych sheet would score out (excluding diving).

Take these numbers with a grain of salt, though they are approximately what we’d expect the outcome to be. If ever there were a year where psych sheet scoring was flawed, this is the year.