A Viewer’s Guide To the International Swimming League’s Naples Stop

2019 International Swimming League: Group A, Match 2 – Naples

  • Saturday, October 12th – Sunday, October 13th
  • 7:00 pm – 9:00 PM, local time (UTC+2), (1:00 pm – 3:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time)
  • Naples, Italy
  • Piscina Felice Scandalone, Via Giochi del Mediterraneo
  • Short Course Meters (SCM)
  • Group A: Cali Condors, DC Trident, Energy Standard, Aqua Centurions

LINKS

WHERE TO WATCH BY REGION

  • United States: ESPN3
  • Europe and Asia-Pacific: Eurosport
  • Australia: 7plus
  • New Zealand: Spark
  • Canada: CBC
  • Latin America: Claro Sport
  • Brazil: TV Globo
  • Caribbean: FlowSports
  • Israel: Sports 1
  • Middle East/North Africa: Bein Sport

Teams Competing

This weekend will feature ‘Group A’ in a rematch of last weekend’s meet. The teams are below with some of their key roster moves for Naples. Links will go to full announced rosters, if available:

  • Energy Standard: skins race winners Sarah Sjostrom and Florent Manaudou will return, along with standout Chad le Clos. Energy Standard will return its entire winning roster from the Indy meet, but will add Fantine Lesaffre.
  • Cali Condors: the roster with the most turnover so far. The big news is that Cali will get star sprinter Caeleb Dresselthe best hope of breaking up Energy Standard’s stranglehold on the triple-point skins races. On the other hand, the roster will lose major scorers Hali Flickinger, Townley Haas and Kelsey Wog from Indy.
  • DC Trident: DC will also see significant turnover from the Indy meet. Distance star Katie Ledecky and Olympic icon Natalie Coughlin are out, though Kevin Cordes will join the team on the men’s side.
  • Aqua Centurions: we have no official roster for the Aqua Centurions at this point.

Event Lineup

Here’s a look at this weekend’s event schedule. Each session is broken into three blocks, each of which ends in a relay event, which is then followed by a break, though the exact length of the breaks has not been specified.

WOMEN’S EVENT # DAY 1 MEN’S EVENT #
1 100 Fly 2
3 50 Breast 4
5 400 IM 6
7
4×100 Free Relay
—Break—
9 200 Back 8
11 50 Free 10
4×100 Medley Relay 12
—Break—
13 200 Free 14
15 50 Back 16
17 200 Breast 18
4×100 Free Relay 19

 

WOMEN’S EVENT # DAY 2 MEN’S EVENT #
20 100 Free 21
22 100 Breast 23
24 400 Free 25
26
4×100 Medley Relay
—Break—
28 200 IM 27
30 50 Fly 29
32 100 Back 31
33 4×100 Mixed Free Relay 33
—Break—
34 200 Fly 35
36 50 Free Skins 37
38 4×50 Mixed Medley (if tiebreak needed) 38

SCORING & POINTS BREAKDOWN

Scoring for each event will be as follows:

INDIVIDUAL EVENT RELAY EVENT SKINS RACE
1st 9 18 27
2nd 7 14 21
3rd 6 12 12
4th 5 10 10
5th 4 8 4
6th 3 6 3
7th 2 4 2
8th 1 2 1

Relays count for double, and skins races effectively triple if you make it to the third round; if eliminated in the second round, an athlete earns double points, but if knocked out in the first round, the point totals are the same as a normal race.

PRIZE MONEY FORMAT

Athletes and relays earn money for top-4 finishes under the following system, which we’ve simplified based on the ISL ‘money point’ system:

Regular season:

INDIVIDUAL EVENT RELAY SKINS
1st $1,800 $900 $5,400
2nd $1,200 $600 $3,600
3rd $600 $300 $1,800
4th $300 $150 $900

Current prize money lists.

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Barry
4 years ago

Is ESPN3 definitely showing the Naples event? It’s not on their schedule as far as I can tell.

Admin
Reply to  Barry
4 years ago

We’ve not heard any differently. They’re just patching the EuroSport feed through, so I can’t imagine why that would be any harder from Naples than Indy.

Barry
Reply to  Braden Keith
4 years ago

Are the times right? It’s listed as 8pm local time here, but 7pm local time on the ISL tickets page (https://isl.global/get-tickets/), and annoyingly not listed at all on the ISL schedule page (https://isl.global/schedule/).

I guess the 8pm local time makes sense since that means all the meets are at the same time (so their tickets page is just all over the place).

Admin
Reply to  Barry
4 years ago

I think the 7PM is correct. An hour earlier than the last meet in absolute time.

ISLfan
4 years ago

would be cool if the skins races would change up the strokes.

Bigswimdog
4 years ago

Let’s add another 50’s skins but the stroke the swimmers do on each 50 is random and picked out of hat just before the they get on the blocks

Yozhik
Reply to  Bigswimdog
4 years ago

The more exciting thing will be a random swimmers selection for each event. Then it would be a real team work. At the end they all are well trained professionals. And random selection will make teams chances even and will force them to swim to the limits. It will be more fun to see Sjostrom trying her best in 200 BR then swimming her half efforts in butterfly. 😀

COVFEFE
4 years ago

200 FLY OR 400 IM SKINS PLS

Admin
Reply to  COVFEFE
4 years ago

That would be so brutal. I bet if you did a 200 IM skins, someone would be unable to finish the 3rd one.

COVFEFE
Reply to  Braden Keith
4 years ago

It would make it exciting and hilarious to watch though! Certainly would be strategic for when to push or not push.

Yozhik
Reply to  Braden Keith
4 years ago

No, they will finish all. They swam 600m plenty of times at practices. But each race will be so slow that it would be me who will stop watching the 3rd one.

spectatorn
Reply to  Braden Keith
4 years ago

so the 3rd round is “finish to win” LOL

With that said, I think the 2nd round will be the fastest round. If you get to the 2nd round, it make sense to swim fast enough to get to the 3rd round – guarantee 21 points for finishing or 27 points if one can get to the wall a fingernail ahead of the other swimmer.

btw, how is points awarded if a swimmer get DQed, say, in the 2nd or 3rd round?

Admin
Reply to  spectatorn
4 years ago

DQ? No idea. There are lots of rules in the ISL that we don’t find out about until ‘it happens.’ So…might be the case here as well.

Barry
Reply to  Braden Keith
4 years ago

Unlike the relay-only swimmer rule, at least this one is listed. There are a lot of DQ-related rules:

* -2 for an individual event.
* -4 for a relay or 2nd round of skins
* -6 for 3rd round of skins

Notably, if you don’t even show up for the 3rd round of skins, that’s -12 points. Which is wild, given that 2nd is 21 points and all you have to do at that point is literally finish. I’m fascinated by the fact that these rules were explicitly listed (https://isl.global/isl-2019-technical-information/).

DBSwims
Reply to  COVFEFE
4 years ago

Id want to see a 400 medley relay skins

Coach John
Reply to  COVFEFE
4 years ago

800IM eliminator!!!!!

CACrushers
Reply to  Coach John
4 years ago

Any kind of eliminator race would be awesome!

Moddiddle
Reply to  COVFEFE
4 years ago

I’m of the opinion that it should be 100 IM instead. 50 free is biased towards sprint freestylers, meaning that you need to specialize in that stroke and have the raw speed to get past R1. I get the premise that viewers want to see the fastest speed possible but butterfly and backstroke underwaters look pretty good too! This gives even sprint breaststrokers like lily king a chance. Increasing the distance to 100 dramatically opens opportunities for distance folk(see Ryk Neethling winning a gold medal in 4 100 free).

RUN-DMC
Reply to  Moddiddle
4 years ago

Stop it Michael Andrew.

marley09
4 years ago

Losing Wog, Flick and Haas means the loss of 57 individual points for Condors who lost last weekend by 60 points. That’s a huge hole to dig out of. Yes, Dressel will make up a lot of those points and will improve the relays but that’s a lot of ground for one guy to recover. Throw in home court advantage for Euro based teams and I put the over/under at 50 points favouring the energy team.

DBSwims
Reply to  marley09
4 years ago

Yes the Condors will lose 3 swimmers, but remember, Dressel could win skins, which none of the Condor mens advanced past the first round. If Dressel does make the finals of skins, Proud or Manaudou will not advance to finals, losing a good amount of points. Also, sprint free and fly was quite weak for the Condor’s men last meet.
Im going to be fully honest, untapered Townley isnt very good so Townley isnt too much of a loss.
For Flickinger and Wog, it will be quite a big lost for individual points. However, even though it will effect relays, it will not be too much(at least, I dont think)

CACrushers
4 years ago

I think the league hasn’t gotten the positive press it deserves. Having said that, I think the second installment will be better for the following reasons:

-Coaches not named James Gibson will do a better job with their line ups
-The commentators will be more familiar with the format, and be able to better communicate it to the audience
-We will have an apples-to-apples comparison for the times, making them more relevant
-We’ll be able to compare point totals from various stages of the competition last weekend, throughout this weekend.
-Caeleb Dressel
//////////
One element that I also really liked from the first match was the extent to which fatigue made it difficult… Read more »

Troyy
Reply to  CACrushers
4 years ago

Also I’ll be surprised if the attendance isn’t better at the European stops.

Yozhik
4 years ago

Alexander Gomelsky, famous Russian basketball coach and HOF inductee was a fan of NBA business. He appreciated the ability to make a sport competition a spectacle with its uncertain development at the beginning with the following culmination and dramatic finish. And to this day I’m with him on that, not being able to get rid of the feeling that each game is orchestrated. Not that they are fixed but they are designed to keep spectators attention all the time and go to the real competition only at the very end of the game. The team can be behind by 20 points after first half and then in one quarter come back. Or even better when the game goes overtime after… Read more »

FlyNDie
Reply to  Yozhik
4 years ago

I don’t know what all the downvotes here are for. I think what you were missing in your statement was the implementation of some kind of draft in the league where each team gets a chance at those influential picks like Chad Le Clos and Sjostrom who can really influence the outcome.

Yozhik
Reply to  FlyNDie
4 years ago

I hope it wasn’t personal. Maybe they don’t like the “manipulation” idea or they hate the word “Russian”, whatever. Who knows. But if they answer “no” to the question if they going to pay for the match between “Energy” and “Centurions” where swimmers from Energy Standard team perform at 70% of their abilities for the win then they may find that there is something to think about.

Cico Grande
Reply to  Yozhik
4 years ago

I think the Centurions focused too much on Italian swimmers when initial signings were happening and we can clearly see that wasn’t the best way to go.
Also, there are some.amazing sprint freestylers who could’ve contributed but aren’t allowed in the League because of doping violations.

Troyy
Reply to  Cico Grande
4 years ago

And rightly so that they’re not allowed.

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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