Revisiting NCAA Recruit Rankings: Men’s High School Class of 2015

Each summer, college swimming fans look forward to recruiting – the lifeblood of any NCAA swim program. Since 2012, we’ve been ranking down the top NCAA prospects in the nation from each recruiting class. But sports are inherently unpredictable, and even the most sure-fire prospect can go awry or completely change their role over four years.

As we do each year, we’ll look back at the high school class of 2014, which just finished four years of college eligibility this spring.

First, a few notes:

• Most of the data we’re tracking here deals with NCAA scoring. Obviously, some swimmers are great assets for their teams in dual meets and conference competition without ever being national factors. While we don’t discount the impact of those types of swimmers, the difference in competition between various teams’ dual meet schedules and conference meets makes NCAA scoring the best “apples to apples” comparisons between swimmers.
• Relays are another point of contention, as a swimmer in a strong program has more opportunity for NCAA relays, though they also have more competition for those relay spots. We’ve mostly left relay results out of the data below, except where specifically indicated. That, too, gives us a more fair comparison between athletes.
• We also did not include diving scorers or recruits.
• We did our best to scour NCAA results over the past four years, but it’s certainly possible we made a mistake in compiling our data. If you spot an error, please respectfully let us know in the comment section so we can update our work!

We only include domestic recruits in our recruit rankings, as it’s often harder to predict if and when an international recruit will join the NCAA, and which class they should be ranked with. However, we’ve gone back through and tallied up all individual scorers that roughly fit into this class – international and domestic.

Revisiting Our Top 10

Check out this post for our analysis of the top 10 recruits in the high school class of 2015. Bear in mind that this was posted in July of 2014, when these swimmers were high school juniors. Complaining about slighted swimmers is barely a scrap above useless at the time of posting, and putting on Captain Hindsight goggles and complaining now without looking up best times from July 2014 is even less enlightening than that.

Here’s a look at our top 10 recruits, plus how many individual points they scored at NCAAs in each of their four years:

• We’ve had some fans retroactively quibble with our ranking of Andrew Seliskar ahead of Townley Haas five years ago, much of that brought about by Haas’s more flashy accomplishments over his first three NCAA seasons. But any argument between the two is a pretty classic case of nit-picking. They were the top two scorers in the class by at least 60 points, and both won multiple NCAA titles – Haas won six overall, three each in the 200 free and 500 free. Seliskar won three overall, all in his senior year. Both were massive relay weapons and both led their teams to an NCAA points title.
• Mike Thomas and Carsten Vissering both held up very well. Vissering scored in all four seasons and probably had a bigger relay impact, but Thomas ultimately scored more points, most of them in his final two seasons.
• Cal and Texas did very well in this class, so it’s no surprise they’ve been the top two teams all four years of this class’s NCAA careers.
• As with the women’s class, there were some misses outside of the top few clear-cut elite recruits. Aidan Burns was a pretty regular NCAA qualifier for Georgia, but never quite cracked scoring. He was a big SEC contributor, though. Cole Cogswell was on an NCAA scoring relay as a sophomore. Brad Zdroik was also a relay scorer for Stanford. Alex Valente did qualify for NCAAs three times and was a Pac-12 runner-up.
• Both Cal’s Nick Norman and Texas’s Tate Jackson came along significantly in their junior and senior seasons after not scoring as freshmen.
• Texas’s Ryan Harty could add to his total with one year remaining after redshirting his sophomore season.
• #19 Jake Miller tragically took his own life in a struggle with depression before he graduated. His untimely passing was one of the catalysts for an increased awareness of mental health and our own ongoing mental health series.

Other Impactful Recruits in the High School Recruiting Class of 2015

Of course, not every contributor comes from our top 20 list. Some swimmers develop extremely well in college. Some swimmers slip under our radar, or don’t really show their ability until their senior year of high school, after our rankings come out.

We dug through NCAA results to find the best American swimmers from this class to not appear on our top 10 list. Again, it’s not always easy to account for redshirt years, gap years or mistakes in an athlete’s listed class each season. So if we forgot anyone, respectfully let us know in the comments.

Domestic

• John Shebat was obviously the biggest riser, scoring the third-most of any swimmer in the class. He’s a case of a huge collegiate explosion. His best times when we ranked this class were 48.1/1:45.3 in the 100/200 back and 1:50.2 in the 200 IM, and he didn’t really become the swimmer we now know until his sophomore year, when he scored 34 points at NCAAs.
• Stanford’s Abrahm DeVine turned out to be another big scorer over all four years. He was actually pretty good out of high school (1:47.6/3:45 in the IMs), though when the top recruit is 1:43/3:41, it probably throws off the perspective a little bit.
• Ready for another fun progression: when we ranked these recruits, Zach Apple was 21.2/46.7/1:41.7 in freestyle. By his senior year of high school, he’d cut to 20.3/44.5/1:38.3, and he ended his college career 18.8/41.3/1:30.3.

International

• Vini Lanza was a huge and consistent international scorer for Indiana.
• Andreas Vazaios came in listed as a junior in 2017 – we originally missed his scores from that year – then swam as a junior in 2018 and senior in 2019. He wound up matching Lanza’s point-total over his three years.
• Mark Nikolaev of Grand Canyon would have been invited to NCAAs in his first two years, but the program (switching to Division I at that point) wasn’t yet fully DI eligible.
• This was a much smaller international senior class than last year’s, when 20 international men scored at some point.

Top 10 Individual Scorers In the Class:

(Ranked recruits are listed with their 2014 rank. International recruits are listed with “INTL” and unranked recruits with “UNR.”)

• Outside of the top two ‘can’t-miss’ prospects, this turned out to be a better class of developmental talent. Guys like Shebat and Apple wound up among the top scorers, along with Ian Finnerty (54.9/2:02.9 in breaststroke when we ranked).
• This was a great class for unranked sprint types: Apple was one of the NCAA’s best at the 50-through-200 during his four years. Justin Ress was a top 10 scorer in the class, just a tick ahead of Minnesota standout Bowe Becker and Alabama star Robert Howard, none of whom was ranked.

More recruiting rank analysis:

Women’s:

• Revisiting recruiting ranks: High school class of 2015
• Re-Ranking the recruiting classes: Collegiate class of 2016-2019
• Revisiting recruiting ranks: High school class of 2018
• 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)