Building A Better Meet Schedule

With the world shutting down, we’re reaching into our archives and pulling some of our favorite stories from the SwimSwam print edition to share online. If you’d like to read more of this kind of story, you can subscribe to get a print (and digital) version of SwimSwam Magazine here. This story was originally published in the 2016 College Feature edition of SwimSwam Magazine.

As a collegiate distance swimmer, I had plenty of things to gripe about to my mid-distance counterparts: workouts that were a bit more monotonous, a shorter taper, and a distinct lack of yoga during morning practices. One small thing I did have going for me was a conference meet schedule that made choosing my events pretty easy. Like many conference meets, ours was scheduled over three days and had the 500 free, 1650 free, and the 400 IM all scheduled on different days. This made picking a schedule that avoided doubling any of them on a single day easy. If I decided I wanted a little bit more “speed” in my events, say swapping the 200 IM for the 500, or the 200 free for the 400 IM, the schedule was similarly accommodating. For reference, here is the standard three-day NCAA meet schedule (individual events):

On the other hand, almost every mid-distance swimmer on my team had one gripe or another about the event schedule. My friend Andrew, for example, a backstroker/freestyler, would have raced the 100 back, 200 back, and 200 free had not the 100 back and 200 free been scheduled only a single event apart on the second day. Every year he was forced, to many complaints, to swim the 500 on the first day so that he could avoid doubling any events on a single day. Another friend, Brian, a flyer/backstroker, was forced into the 500 every year as well to avoid a hard double of either the 200 backstroke and 200 butterfly or the 100 backstroke and the 100 butterfly.

Since I felt a bit of pity for them, I thought that I would try and re-design the three-day meet format so that fewer swimmers were forced to double events on a single day. To do this, I first had to measure what events were usually paired together. I went through the data for 2016 and for every NCAA swimmer, found their three fastest events in terms of their best swim’s percentile rank. I then created a correlation matrix that would show how commonly swum each event was which each other. The data included swimmers across both genders and all divisions.

(Click image to enlarge)

One thing to note here is that the percentages are not reciprocal, so for example a 200 backstroker is more likely to taper the 100 freestyle than a 100 freestyler is to taper the 200 backstroke since unsurprisingly, the 100 freestyle is a more popular event to swim tapered than the 200 backstroke.

A couple of observations:

1. 1650 swimmers tend to be the most specialized.
2. People tend to group more around strokes than they do distances.
3. 200 IMers and 200 freestylers tend to be the most generalized.
4. The two most popular combinations were the breastrokes and the 50/100 free

Using this data, I then checked all 3^13th possible three-day meet combinations to see which ones would minimize the amount of doubles on a single day. Here are the top meet lineups that I found (changes from the standard format are bolded):

Unsurprisingly, the current three-day meet schedule was the best combination. It has a big leg up on all the others since swimmers often conform their event lineups to the current meet schedule, swimming slightly worse events for them on different days rather than trying to double on a single day. I had hoped that perhaps enough swimmers had top times from either four-day meets or from multiple different taper meets to tip the balance away from the current schedule, but no such luck.

Most of the other top choices were very similar to the current format and only involved minor changes such as swapping the 100 and 200 breaststroke or swapping the 100 and 200 butterfly. However, I did find a couple of interesting options. One was moving either the 100 backstroke or 100 butterfly to the first day. This makes some sense to me since it balances out the number of events on each day. It does make some sprinters combo the 100 of stroke with the 50 freestyle, but I would think that both are short enough to make it manageable, something I didn’t take into consideration in my analysis.

Since I was curious, I found data on the most commonly used lineup combinations and the % of total 3 event lineups they comprise as well. The following nine lineups comprise 50% or all three-day meet lineups swum. I also listed the average strength rank of the swimmers who swum that lineup. The scale on the strength ranking goes from 0 to 1, with 1 being the fastest. Unsurprisingly, IMers came out on top. With the combination of the 400 IM, 200 IM, and 200 breaststroke (too uncommon to be shown below) coming in with a strength ranking of .75.