How Much Faster are Conference Championship Meets Getting? Part II: SEC Women

This article is the second in a series looking at how the times at the conference level have been changing in the last five years (2020-2024) for the Power Five conferences and the Ivy League. It’s felt like the times required to qualify, final and win have been coming down considerably recently, but how much does the data back this up?

We’ll be including the Pac-12, despite its swimming & diving championships no longer running.

1. SEC Men
2. SEC Women
3. ACC Men
4. ACC Women
5. PAC-12 Men
6. PAC-12 Women
7. Big Ten Men
8. Big Ten Women
9. Big-12
10. Ivy League

The top of the SEC has moved around recently – Tennessee, Kentucky and Florida have all won the conference championship in the last five years. This year we may get another different winner, as Texas gears up for its first season in their new conference. Texas, Florida and Tennessee finished 2-3-4 at NCAAs last year, so this should be a great battle for the conference title. Georgia’s distance swimmers, led by Rachel Stege, and Alabama’s sprinters will push them in specific events, but these three are the big guns.

WHAT DATA ARE WE LOOKING AT? 

We’ll look at the times required individually to make ‘A; (8th), ‘B’ (16th) and ‘C’ (24th) finals (where they exist), as well as the winning time for each year. For relays, we’ll choose to look at 1st, 3rd and 8th. If there were fewer than eight teams competing, we would just take the times from 1st and 3rd. Other than the winning individual time, these will all be from heats.

WHAT ARE WE INTERESTED IN?

Have the times got faster, and is there a definitive trend in the times? The first of these is simple to work out – were last year’s times faster than in 2020 – but the second is a little trickier. How do we judge what is significant and what is maybe due to a single swimmer, à la Gretchen Walsh? To make this decision, we make use of something known as correlation- essentially how much of a link is there between two separate variables. In our case, the two variables are the year and the finishing time for each position.

A QUICK STATISTICS REFRESHER

The R-value is the measure of correlation and can take a value between -1 and 1. To get a sense of what an R-value means, there are three important values:

• An R-value of 1 would indicate that there is a perfectly linear positive relationship between the two (eg. each year the winning time increases by 0.5),
• An R-value of -1 would indicate a perfectly linear negative relationship (eg. each year the winning time decreases by 0.5).
• An R-value of 0 indicates that there is no relationship between the two – the winning time does not depend on the year at all.

Think about plotting the data on a graph of year against time and drawing a best-fit line through the points. The closer the points are to that line, the more correlated the data and the higher the R-value.

WHAT MAKES AN R-VALUE SIGNIFICANT?

With the data we’re choosing to look at, an R-value is only significant if it is either greater than 0.805 or less than -0.805. That is a pretty high threshold, and we’ll see that for some events and placings there’s a strong trend that doesn’t quite hit this.

So what does significant mean? In this context, it means that we can say that there is an extremely strong trend in the times for this event and placement getting faster – and that it’s happening every year. A winning time that has a general downward trend but fluctuates pretty wildly year on year will have an R-value closer to zero than an event that gets faster at a slower rate, but gets faster every time.

The R-value in this case is a measure of consistency – how confident we are that this is a real trend and not just noise in the data. The significance level (0.805) is our confidence threshold in this.

Because the significance threshold is so high, we’ll also define another – a strong threshold. We’ll set this to be when the R-value is greater than 0.5 or less than -0.5. Anything between these two values we’ll call Weak.

AN OVERVIEW

Of the 67 event/position combinations, 43 have been trending faster over the last five years.

There are marked differences between strokes. Mid-distance and distance freestyle times are coming down almost universally, whereas the sprint freestyles are the opposite. However, what we are then seeing is a general trend downwards top-to-bottom. Thirty-five event/position combinations were faster last year than in 2020, and given this year’s top-16 times this could jump up to the mid-50s.

Similarly to the men’s side, the winning time for six individual events is trending slower. It makes sense as this depends much more on individual swimmers – think of what the trend in the winning time at Worlds will be in the 1500 after Katie Ledecky retires.

FREESTYLE

The sprint freestyles are trending upwards. Anna Hopkin’s winning times from 2020 are a big reason for the trend in winning times, as does Maggie Macneil’s from 2023, but the times required to final are increasing across the board. The 200 is the opposite. Although weak, this is trending quicker – something we’ll see for the distance freestyles as well. Camille Spink and Bella Sims are the favorites for these three events come February 18th, but Texas with Erin Gemmell and the fast-improving Lillian Nesty among others, will help push these trends downwards over the next couple of years.

The 500 has become an incredibly deep event nationally on the women’s side, and the SEC is a big part of that. Twenty-eight women have broken 4:40 so far this season, and 13 of those are from this conference, highlighted by Jillian Cox‘s 4:30.68. That 13 doesn’t include Bella Sims, last year’s SEC champion in the event. Distance events tend not to see the huge drops we’ve seen recently in the sprints, but a widespread, if weak, trend faster is never a bad sign.

BACKSTROKE

Winning times for both distances on the way up, final times in the 100 trending down. Rhyan White dominated backstroke at the conference level for Alabama, and that dominance led to slightly slower winning times. 2024 did see a swing back up in both distances, and with Josephine Fuller and Bella Sims fighting it out for the conference titles this may well continue. There are big improvements this year lower down as well – the current 16th fastest SEC time in the 100 (Florida’s Katie Schroeder) is only five one-hundredths off what was required to make last year’s ‘A’ final.

BREASTSTROKE

In a complete reversal of the men’s side, women’s breaststroke in the SEC has the strongest trends. The 100 has a significant trend faster down to ‘b’ final times, and has had a distinctly international flavor. Mona McSharry has won the last three titles, including leading an international 1-2-3 last year with Avery Wiseman and Emelie Fast, and this year’s leader (Anita Bottazzo) is another.

FLY

Both distances show a similar trend – not much movement at the top, and strong-to-significant improvements further down. The squeeze for ‘B’ and ‘C’ final places will push those ‘A’ final times up, as will the addition of Texas’s fly crew. Emma Sticklen comes in with times this season that would easily have won last year, and the seeded times for 8th are big drops – by over two seconds in the case of the 200.

IM

Just like the 50 and 100 free, both medley distances are seeing times creep up. Texas, currently seeded to have four ‘A’ finalists in the 200 and three in the 400, will bump these downwards. Whether Bella Sims swims the 400 may decide quite how fast that winning time is, but Emma Weyant, fresh from finishing 3rd behind Summer McIntosh and Katie Grimes in Paris, could take this under 4 minutes if she can match her PB from NCAAs.

RELAYS

Weak trends downward in the freestyles, strong ones in the medleys. Almost all of these events are trending faster – all five current relay records have been set since 2020, including three last year (400 FR, 800 FR, 400 MED). Texas will increase the competition for podium places in all of these events, and have swum times this season faster than last year’s winning times in both the 200 FR and 200 MED.

IN SUMMARY

Whilst the trend faster is not quite as obvious as on the men’s side, two-thirds are event/position combinations are on the way down. There are events where the trends are almost all upward, but there is a big reason why these might be about to change – Texas. The SEC had four wins at NCAAs last year, three of them from Florida, and while Virginia does have somewhat of a stranglehold on the top step the SEC is well-represented on the podium, and likely even more so this year.