The Big Pond, Small Pond Test in College Swimming

The last few weeks of college swimming has been littered with disappointment. Hundreds of student-athletes have been cut from their D1 rosters and been faced with the choice of leaving the elite ranks of the competitive sport or uprooting their lives and social networks and relocating to a different school.

While I wouldn’t attempt to diminish those emotions or how challenging those decisions are to make, when reading about Luke Stibrich’s transfer to LSU yesterday, a thought dawned on me about the opportunity that might be presented.

LSU head coach Rick Bishop can coach. He turned Maggie MacNeil from a star to a superstar at Michigan, and at LSU has built a team that reliably sends a roster – not just an individual – to the NCAA Championships.

While the Tigers haven’t really landed big domestic recruits yet, it’s clear that Rick Bishop can coach. For a swimmer like Luke Stibrich, leaving Bob Bowman is tough: Bowman is 1a, 1b, or 1c the hottest coach on the planet right now, depending on where your national interests lie. But Bishop is a very good coach who can make swimmers faster.

This move is going to test the coaching depth in swimming. We’re going to find out who can coach and who can’t in a hurry. This will be a two-fold construct. On the one hand, the pressure on top coaches to ‘hit’ on a higher percentage of their swimmers at blue-blood programs like Texas, Florida, Cal, and Michigan is ramped up, because the days of the sign-and-stash of top tier recruits to see which of the 35 works out are gone.

At the lower tier, at programs like Florida Gulf Coast and Tampa and Liberty and LSU, coaches who maybe weren’t great recruiters or didn’t have the same brand as the big names will be getting faster swimmers out of high school and out of the transfer portal, and will have to figure out how to continue to develop swimmers who arrive with a lot more ‘stuff’ under their belts. This will test the depth of American collegiate coaching.

Just as some coaches will flourish under this new structure, some swimmers will inevitably learn that they are a different ‘type’ than they thought they were. Some athletes thrive as a small or medium sized fish in a big pond, while others thrive as big fish in smaller ponds. Athletes, naturally, are predisposed to think of themselves as ‘big pond’ types, but pragmatically, the real world bears out that some of us fall in one category and some fall into the other. We need all types to run this world – and these are the differences that create an interesting world.

And nobody can prognosticate perfectly. There’s the famous example of Ohio State’s Nyah Funderburke qualifying for the NCAA Championships from the Buckeyes’ non-scoring roster at Big Tens a few years ago, as an example. But when we look across time, there will be plenty of proof within the pudding about who is connecting at a higher rate.

There are no doubts in my mind that we will see swimmers transfer from a big name program to a lesser-branded program (at least by swimming standards) and beat athletes who were kept by their former teams. And not just beat: someone will go to a new school and find that they are absolutely thriving as an A-relay swimmer versus a ‘hoping to break through and make the conference team as a senior’ swimmer. They will find a new coach that they connect better with – now that they’re making these decisions at 19 or 20 rather than 16 or 17.

These are the stories that can sustain a sport in the next few years as we adapt to the new reality. There is so much negativity in swimming right now – and I’ll be the first to say that most of it is warranted: our leadership has failed us in innumerable ways. These positive stories – these classic, underdog, once-slighted, now-king stories – are what can drive our sport forward amid the gray skies.