2024 WOMEN’S NCAA SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS
- March 20-23, 2024
- Gabrielsen Natatorium, Athens, Georgia
- Short Course Yards (25 yards)
- Pre-Scratch Psych Sheets
With last week’s release of the invites for the 2024 NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships, we can get a more-holistic picture of where collegiate swimming is going in terms of speed.
In a rather-unusual outcome, 5 out of 13 events on the women’s schedule had slower invite times in 2024 than they did in 2023, and very few events were significantly-faster.
One event was quite a bit slower: in the 1650 free, the invite time got 1.09 seconds slower.
The times getting slower in the 500 and 1650 freestyles were the biggest surprise on this list. The women’s distance freestyles have been in a trough the last few seasons in the NCAA, with winning times coming in slower than the Ledecky-era.
Anecdotally, the expectation was that the trend in these events was changing in the 2023-2024 season. That perception was driven by things like 7 swimmers already this season faster in the 500 free than the 4:36.62 that won last year (Bella Sims, Rachel Stege, Emma Weyant, Lindsay Looney, Dune Coetzee, and Aimee Canny).
But, as is often the case, what’s happening at the top can skew what’s happening in the next tiers of the sport. The distance races were still getting way faster overall the last few years, even if the times at the top weren’t reflective of that. And this year, while the top-end has gotten much faster, the next level of of NCAA swimmers have normalized a bit.
Women’s NCAA Invited Times Through the Years
| EVENT (SCY) | 2020 INVITE TIME | 2021 INVITE TIME | 2022 INVITE TIME | 2023 INVITE TIME |
2024 INVITE TIME
|
Change |
| 50 free | 22.21 | 22.32 | 22.16 | 22.15 | 22.11 | -0.04 |
| 100 free | 48.51 | 48.76 | 48.44 | 48.37 | 48.34 | -0.03 |
| 200 free | 1:45.23 | 1:46.25 | 1:45.42 | 1:45.31 | 1:44.80 | -0.51 |
| 500 free | 4:41.20 | 4:44.77 | 4:43.08 | 4:41.09 | 4:41.19 | +0.10 |
| 1650 free | 16:17.45 | 16:25.47 | 16:16.47 | 16:13.73 | 16:14.82 | +1.09 |
| 100 fly | 52.34 | 52.7 | 52.35 | 52.2 | 51.88 | -0.32 |
| 200 fly | 1:56.06 | 1:57.42 | 1:56.14 | 1:55.92 | 1:55.88 | -0.04 |
| 100 back | 52.73 | 53.01 | 52.46 | 52.36 | 52.28 | -0.08 |
| 200 back | 1:53.99 | 1:55.05 | 1:53.97 | 1:53.94 | 1:54.01 | +0.07 |
| 100 breast | 59.98 | 1:00.12 | 59.87 | 59.73 | 59.75 | +0.02 |
| 200 breast | 2:10.12 | 2:10.37 | 2:09.15 | 2:09.68 | 2:09.55 | -0.13 |
| 200 IM | 1:57.31 | 1:57.62 | 1:56.85 | 1:56.90 | 1:57.03 | +0.13 |
| 400 IM | 4:10.39 | 4:13.19 | 4:11.60 | 4:11.36 | 4:10.74 | -0.62 |
Note above the anomaly in 2021, where many teams didn’t compete in the college season and when those who did had truncated or interrupted years. It’s also worth addressing that while the 2020 NCAA Championships never happened, invites were made, so we still have the comparable data.
So what does this all mean? Aside from anomalies like the COVID year, it’s very unusual for invite times to get slower from year-to-year, especially in 5 events.
We could blame it on redshirts from the Olympic year – but we didn’t see that trend in 2016 or 2020.
While the sport seems to have been on a runaway train of improvement in the last few years, especially at the age group level, at some point that train was going to stop. Again, the perception though was that more swimmers were swimming faster in-season, which in general should lead to faster NCAA Championship qualifying times.
Have we begun approaching the limit of the sport? Or is this just a one year *blip* that will return to its normal trajectory next season?
I wonder if Olympic redshirting had a bigger impact due to the number of high schoolers opting for a gap year.
This is an interesting headline, because overall times are faster than last year. Yes, 5 events are slower, but 8 events are faster and with greater proportions. .51 in the 200 free is huge, .62 in the 400 IM also much bigger than the biggest add from the last year, the 1.09 in the 1650, which is the equivalent of about .30 for a 400 and .15 for a 200.
Distance swimming is still recovering from Covid it looks like, but it also just may be natural fluctuations in event bunching with different cohorts coming through their 4-5 years.
Expecting every event to be faster than the year before for it to be considered a fast year seems… Read more »
Slow times in women’s distance swimming is about as surprising as Rory McIroy hitting a driver more than 200 yards. The top women simply aren’t interested in those events. There’s been too much desperation here the past 6 months to pretend anything has changed or will change.
Good thing Katie Ledecky wasn’t a top woman so she could get herself interested in distance events.
https://ibb.co/3ss8Pp7
I was curious as to how the change from the previous invite year varied across disciplines so here’s a quick graphical representation for just the 100s and 200s of each stroke! i have more plots that i made for frees/IMs but just for now i am posting this one! was just curious because just looking at numbers was hard for me and i wanted to see it graphically!
the variation amongst the 200s is something im kind of surprised by! down to do some more in depth analysis if people are wondering 🙂 swim nerds unite hahah
when looking at the linked spreadsheet that has times from 2013, it seems the rows for 100 back and 200 back got switched with the rows of 100 breast and 200 breast between 2016-2018
just a psa that it’s been fixed since this comment was posted and the updated data were what was used for the graph in the comment above
What a relief!
Possibly due to the dropping out of the 5th years over time?
Yes, that’s a really good theory.
Could a reason for this be that a lot of people in certain events were returning 5th years or seniors who didn’t come back for the extra year and so the events got slower as a result?
This certainly plays into it a little bit. I’d also like to know how many 5th years are in each event. Did it skew sprint?
It wouldn’t shock me if mostly sprinters stayed back for a 5th year. Coaches are more willing to keep their scholarships for another year, and training for sprints for another year is more attractive than training longer races for that much longer