East vs. West: Which Region Reigned Supreme at the 2023 US Winter Junior Championships?

Thanks to Barry Revzin for crunching the data on this.

The annual Speedo Winter Junior Championships are among the best domestic meets every year, with new names breaking through, familiar names posting jaw-dropping times, and records falling by the handful.

Since USA Swimming split the meet into two events in 2015 to deal with the increasing depth becoming two big for a single Winter Junior National Championship event, we’ve been unable to see some of the biggest head-to-head matchups actualize. This year, that included future Virginia teammates Thomas Heilman of Cavalier Aquatics in Virginia and Maximus Williamson of the Lakeside Aquatic Club in Texas, who were sent to different meets.

While swimmers are sent to different meets, we can put the results together, on paper, to figure out a mythical ‘national’ champion.

SwimSwam’s Anne Lepesant has been tracking the top 8s in each event from the two meets combined from throughout the week, and what that work has revealed is that while both sides have some show-stopping swimmers, the East meet was much deeper than the West meet.

• Day 1 combined top 8s
• Day 2 combined top 8s
• Day 3 combined top 8s
• Day 4 combined top 8s

Anne’s analysis showed that the West region won just 11 out of the 36 events in this theoretical analysis.

That’s a flip from last year, where West was the better of the two meets. Both sides were missing some of their hallmark teams. The west was without the Sandpipers of Nevada, for example, who won the West meet. The east was without the Sarasota Sharks and the country’s biggest team, NCAP, which per usual instead attended their own Tom Dolan Invitational.

The meet uses the same scoring system as the NCAA Championships. Top 16 score in each event, with 1st place earning 20, 2nd 17, then on to 16, 15, 14,13, 12, 11 in the A-final; and 9-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, in order, for the B-final. Relays score double.

East Vs. West, Mythical Scoring

1. East – 4,282.5 (2,253.5 for men, 2,029 for women)
2. West – 2,847.5 (1,311.5 for men, 1,536 for women)

In total, 242 teams participated in the two meets, with 81 scoring at the West meet and 63 at the East meet.

When we mash all of the results together, the East dominance becomes more obvious. The top 3 teams all come from the East region, as do 5 of the top 6. The top-finishing West team is the Lakeside Aquatic Club (formerly mentioned as Maximus Williamson‘s team).

The caveats to address the comments that are going to come:

• While the geographical split makes sense visually, there are probably more swimmers zoned to the West meet than the East meet
• The West meet was very far from some portions of the West zone
• The East meet was very far from some portions of the East zone
• NCAP, the biggest club in the country, hosted its own mid-season invite
• NCAP is still a very good and very deep club, but doesn’t have the superstars like it sometimes has in the past (Katie Ledecky, Tom Dolan, Cassidy Bayer, Ed Moses, Roque Santos, Mike Barrowman) so less of a factor than in other years
• But still a factor
• California is hosting a Sectionals meet the weekend after Winter Juniors
• Summer McIntosh is Canadian but training in Florida
• Lydia Jacoby is in college (but in the same hemi-nation that she grew up in, West)

Combined East + West Meet Results, Team Scoring

Note: this scoring is done on the basis of taking the results of both meets, putting them together, and rescoring as if it was one meet.