When signing is officially open tomorrow for the spring college recruiting season on Tuesday, the Georgia men will add another swimmer to their outstanding class – Florida-raised, Kuwaiti National, Yousef Alaskari.
Alaskari swims internationally for Kuwait, but is currently a high school student in Florida. He moved to the United States in 2008 to train, where he landed at American Heritage High School and among the big international group that trains with the Davie Nadadores.
Alaskari said after last year’s State Championship meet, where he won the 100 fly and 200 free titles, that the decision came down to Georgia and Florida State, but in a year where Georgia coach Jack Bauerle hit just about every peg in recruiting, Alaskari ultimately chose the Bulldogs. Among those he will join in Athens will be Ediz Yildiremer out of Houston, who is in a similar situation – he’s a Turkish National that came to the US as a foreign exchange student and to train and Matias Koski, who lives in Atlanta, but competes internationally for Finland.
He’s got some good international experience from competition with his native Kuwait, where he is one of the country’s top swimmers. He competed at the 2010 World Short Course Championships, as well as the 2010 Asian Games. He also swam at the 2011 Pan-Arab Games, where his 54.00 in the 100 fly (long course) and 2:00.75 in the 200 both took silver medals behind only the famed Ous Mellouli.
He’s an extremely versatile swimmer – though his best bets seem like they’ll come out as the butterflies – where the Bulldogs are going to lack serious depth next year after the graduation of Michael Arnold (though Douglas Reynolds does return). His best yards swims in the butterflies are 47.90/1:47.51, respectively.
But as is indicated by those times, he’s decent in every event, and can swim all of the freestyles from the 50 to the 200. His bests in those races are 20.81/45.01/1:36.98. Those swims, with some decent development, should put him shortly onto the Georgia freestyle relays next season; those are relays with some good young talent, but that really needs more results to take this team towards the top 5.
Alaskari joins an unbelievable Georgia class – maybe the best the Bulldog men have ever seen – that includes Chase Kalisz from NBAC, Matias Koski out of Atlanta, Matthew Ellis also out of Austin, and the aforementioned Yildiremer, all of whom are top-10 recruits in the class. Tag on Ty Stewart, the best swimmer ever to come out of Mississippi, Garrett Powell out of Maryland who has had a spectacular senior year and whom I believe has a big-time future at the national level, and Zach Gunn, another NITRO swimmer and this is just a scary-good class. It doesn’t have the David Nolan that last year’s Stanford class had (and frankly, nobody does), but after that this is every bit as good as the group we saw head to Palo Alto last year.
I really have a problem with State Universities giving scholarship money to foreign nationals rather than USA kids. Obviously, these coaches are looking for the quick fix rather than trusting their coaching skills and developing red, white, and blue athletes. Eddie Reese does it the right way as far as I am concerned. Plus, we are training foreign swimmers to potentially beat our USA swimmers in international events.
Oh grow a pair will you? So what if they give scholarships to foreign nationals? I think whoever does it best deserves to get it. Maybe you should go practice rather than bitch about it here.
Kuwaiti nationals have their own scholarships supplied by the Kuwaiti government, just thought I should let you know that.,
Powell has actually improved a ton since the dogs signed him. He’s now 4:20.0/14:58. This class is a HUGE mover for them.
How does Georgia have all this money? Also, I’ve always wondered, do foreign students “cost” the same in scholarship $ as American recruits? Sorry, but we’re only familiar with Texas swimming…
how can you sign someone a day before the signing date?