What Will it Take to Qualify for the 2021 Division I NCAA Championships?

While there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the next few months will look like, the 2020-2021 NCAA Division I season is well underway, and with some teams and swimmers having thrown down some big swims already, we figured it’s time to look at it what it should take to make the 2021 NCAA Division I Championships.

As a refresher — the invite system is somewhat complicated, but, essentially, achieving an ‘A’ (automatic) qualifying time gets you in. After that, the next-fastest swimmers in each event get added until the total participant number (270 for men, 322 for women) is met. You can read a full breakdown of how that works here.

The cut line to get invited to NCAAs falls roughly around the same time each year, normally getting slightly faster each season – all 29th-ranked men made it in last season (with some 30s) and all 37th-ranked women made it (with some 38s). While invite times generally get faster each year, last season was a bit of an outlier in that the invite in several events had actually gotten slower two years in a row. Under a normal season, we might expect some of those times to take a big leap and get faster than they had been in 2018. However, this is not a normal season, and with one whole team sitting out (Arizona State), Olympic redshirts or deferrals. and international stars who may or may not arrive second semester, it’s possible that invite times could end up slower across the board this year.

Here’s a quick look at what it took to get an invite in each event over the last three seasons:

The NCAA elected to keep the individual A and B standards, as well as the relay qualifying and provisional standards, the same as last year. You can read more about that here. All relays with the Qualifying Standard can swim at the NCAA Championships, provided they have 1 individual (swimmer or diver) invited to the meet as well. Once a team has a relay invited, they can swim any relay in which they have a provisional standard as well. Relays are qualified “to the team,” not to the individual swimmers, so teams can take whichever swimmers they want to participate in relays.

At no additional charge, here’s a quick list of all the swimmers who have secured NCAA ‘A’ cuts, based on USA Swimming’s database. So far, Virginia sophomore Kate Douglass leads the women with ‘A’ cuts in four events, and Texas A&M junior Shaine Casas leads the men with ‘A’ cuts in five events. Once a swimmer has secured an ‘A’ cut (or an invite), they are eligible to swim any other event in which they have a ‘B’ cut, with a limit of three individual events at NCAAs.