Revisiting NCAA Recruit Rankings: Men’s High School Class of 2017

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 2017, 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 left relay results out of the data below, except where specifically indicated. That, too, gives us a more fair comparison between athletes.
• We don’t rank diving recruits, but we have started to track individual diving scoring, which is helpful in determining how much of an impact a diver is likely to have on NCAA finish.
• We did our best to scour NCAA results over the past four-plus 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!

2021 Note: Between last year’s canceled NCAA meet, the resulting added eligibility for athletes, and the number of entire programs and conferences taking redshirt seasons for 2021, some of these athletes may have years of scoring still to come, and there are some continuing discussions on which classes each athlete belongs in, particularly with international athletes.

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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 20

Check out this post for our analysis of the top 20 recruits in the high school class of 2017. Bear in mind that this was posted in July of 2016, when these swimmers were high school juniors, and looks much different with the benefit of hindsight.

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

The hits:

• “Hoffer is a tailor-made NCAA blue chip recruit,” we wrote back in 2016. Even if his 100 free didn’t improve much in college, Ryan Hoffer clearly lived up to that label. He was the highest-scoring swimmer in the class – by a longshot – and won 4 individual and 3 relay titles over his career.
• Cal got five of our top 20 recruits, and every single one produced. In fact, all five wound up in the top 8 in the entire class (divers included) in individual scoring. Trenton Julian was a standout, scoring 96 points as the #15 recruit. Sean Grieshop scored nearly 100 individually. Both Bryce Mefford and Daniel Carr outperformed their ranks.
• All-in-all, this was a pretty great class across the board. Three men in the class won individual NCAA titles, and all three were top-20 recruits (#1 Hoffer, #6 Katz, #18 Albiero).
• Nicolas Albiero had perhaps the best rise of any of our ranked recruits, moving from the #18 prospect to the #2 overall swimming scorer in the class.

The misses:

• Only 6 of our top 20 didn’t score points individually – and that’s in a class that had only three NCAA opportunities with the 2020 cancellation. Two of our low-end ranked recruits swam for Harvard and missed the 2021 season when the Ivy League canceled winter sports as well.
• There were two big misses at the top. Michael Taylor was an elite backstroke prospect – in fact, we recently included him as one of the top 50 recruits of the past decade. Health issues kept him from competing at the college level – he had at least six surgeries for ulcerative collitis.
• Hirschberger was a NAG-record-breaking distance swimmer out of high school. He earned an NCAA invite as a sophomore, but didn’t score.
• Yeager was a roster cap casualty for Texas in 2020, but earned three NCAA invites in his four years.

OTHER IMPACTFUL RECRUITS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL RECRUITING CLASS OF 2016

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.

Standouts:

• Interestingly enough, a few of the ranked distance swimmers (Hirschberger, Yeager) dropped out of scoring, the top unranked recruits were distance swimmers who rose to fill their spots. Arizona’s Brooks Fail was a standout, scoring 58 total points including 42 as a senior. Zach Yeadon scored 34 in two years for Notre Dame, then 22 more in his senior year with Cal.
  • Here’s a quick look at some lifetime-bests among those four from when we ranked them in 2016 to their freshmen college seasons:
    • Hirschberger: 4:16.4/14:51—–> 4:16.4/14:51
    • Yeager: 4:24.3/14:55———–> 4:19.4/14:48
    • Fail: 4:26.2/15:15————–>4:14.8/14:46.7
    • Yeadon: 4:23.01/15:09———>4:12.7/14:34
• A bunch of these unranked recruits transferred at some point in their careers. Yeadon scored for both of his collegiate programs, but all of the others only scored for their second programs. That includes Alvin Jiang, Mark Theall, and Chris Staka.

International

Standouts:

• Hugo Gonzalez scored 49 in just two NCAA meets – he could still have another year of eligibility.
• This was a great international class of breaststrokers and IMers. Caio Pumputis was the top-scoring international recruit, and Evgenii Somov was a big-time breaststroke prospect. That filled in some for the U.S.-based recruiting group, which didn’t have many breaststrokers in the top 20.

Diving

Standouts:

• Here’s one to rekindle all of last week’s impassioned debates: the top scorer in this class wasn’t Hoffer… it was diver Jordan Windle, who scored 144 points in three NCAA appearances.
• This was an incredible diving class. Windle, Andrew Capobianco, and Brandon Loschiavo all won individual NCAA titles. Zach Cooper was also a top-20 individual NCAA scorer in this class.

All Individual Scorers In the Class

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

BONUS: THE SUPER-SENIORS

Usually, we have a handful of holdovers from previous classes who sat out with redshirts. This year, we have two:

Stanford’s Grant Shoults scored as a freshman (26 in 2017) and sophomore (18 in 2018), then missed 2019 on a medical redshirt. After the 2020 cancellation, he returned to score 11 points this season, bringing him to 55 for his career. That makes him the top scorer among our ranked recruits in the class of 2016, where he was the #3 prospect.

Georgia’s Javier Acevedo was the #4 international scorer in that class through his junior year. He sat out 2020 on an Olympic redshirt, but returned this year to score a career-high 34 for the Bulldogs. That makes him the #2 international scorer in the class, albeit with one more NCAA meet than anyone else in that class.

Class of 2016 recruits revisited (as of last year)

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