I have a perception about women’s swimming in this country: that it’s getting faster. There are always some outliers, but female swimmers seem to be getting faster-and-faster at younger-and-younger ages, which is evidenced by the onslaught of the National Age Group Record books even after the era of the suits.
If that’s in fact true, it hasn’t yet shown up in the NCAA (other than maybe that the top teams are just as good as ever, but much younger than ever. This year’s NCAA invited times are strikingly similar to last year’s, in fact.
Out of the 14 individual events in the official NCAA schedule, 9 had “Invited” times that were set roughly a tenth plus-or-minus last year’s “Invited” times. And of the 5 that weren’t that close, two (the 200 fly and 200 breast) were about two-tenths off.
The only events were times have sung pretty dramatically is the 500 free, where last year’s Invited cutoff was at 4:42.69, whereas this year’s was a much uicker 4:42.12. That equates to a four-swimmer difference this season. That’s not
There were two events that were actually identical to last year’s mark – the 100 breast (Navy’s Laura Gorinski in 1:00.72) and the 100 free (Wisconsin’ Rebecka Palm and Florida’s Elise Zalewski with matching 48.95’s).
The relays, however, are a much different story. Qualifying times in four out of the 5 relay events were drastically change, with only the 200 medley coming in nearly identically to last year’s meet. This seems to make more sense that there would be swings, as there’s an even larger variability factor in each time in that there’s four swimmers in each relay:
400 Medley Relay: .8 seconds faster
200 Medley Relay: .6 seconds faster
200 Free Relay: .05 seconds slower
400 Free Relay: .4 seconds faster
800 Free Relay: .3 seconds slower
If I had to guess, I’d say that this trend will change next year. With so many young swimmers at this meet, as they age (though not always a given in women’s swimming) these qualifying times should start to get faster.