How Much Faster are Conference Championship Meets Getting? Part IV: ACC Women

This article is number four in the 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 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, even though the conference swim & dive championships no longer exist.

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

It’s clear who the powerhouse is in the ACC. Louisville and especially NC State have pushed them hard at points, but Virginia have strength in depth everywhere as well as the heavyweight punch to win 17 of 18 events at ACCs last year. Stanford and Cal may have something to say about that in their first year in the conference, but Virginia has seen tough challenges before from NC State and is unlikely to be upstaged

Further down Miami and UNC continue to punch above their weight, buoyed by their strong diving corps, and Duke has gone from strength to strength under Dan Colella and Brian Barnes – it’s not an easy ride for those at the top.

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, 60 have been trending faster over the last five years.

The ACC Women match the SEC men, with 60 combinations trending faster – that’s 89.6%. These are spread fairly evenly across our three groups, and encompass every distance and stroke: there’s no weak spot. Distance freestyle is as close as they get to one, but the depth here is dropping times required to final – and the addition of Katie Grimes will certainly help at the very top there.

FREESTYLE

Like the men, the ACC women are dropping time in the spring freestyles. Not only has Gretchen Walsh taken the winning times down far beyond what you could have predicted in 2020, but it’s very nearly been a Virginia sweep in the 50 and 100. Between Morgan Hill, Kate Douglass and Walsh they’ve dominated here. Alex Walsh, Ella Nelson and Aimee Canny have all won conference titles in the 200 as well. The ‘A’ final time in the 50 is one to keep an eye on as well – it doesn’t just qualify you for NCAAs anymore, it scores there as well. Whilst maybe not the biggest surprise from a conference that put six swimmers in last year’s NCAA ‘A’ final, it’s certainly a statement.

Surprisingly given the improvements in the 500 free nationwide over the last couple of years, the ACC has a pretty strong trend slower at most levels. There’s no shortage of quick women, evidenced by Virginia alone having three swimmers under 2024’s winning time in Aimee Canny, Katie Grimes and last year’s winner Cavan Gormsen. Distance free is the area where we’ve consistently seen times either stabilize or trend slower so far, and the ACC backs that up here. Aurora Roghair should help drop the winning times significantly this year, and a lot of the other improvements will also be due to the addition of Cal and Stanford.

BACKSTROKE

Gretchen Walsh and Katherine Berkoff are the two fastest swimmers in history in the 100, and have won ACCs in the event all five years here. The winning time has shot down as they’ve broken record after record, but the improvement goes all the way down to ‘C’ final places.

The 200 is a bit more consistent at the top. Despite three different women winning the event in this period (Emma Muzzy, Reilly Tiltmann and Kennedy Noble), it’s taken a 1:50 to win each year, and ‘A’ final times hover in the 1:54s. There are strong trends further down which are likely to push down the ‘A’ final time as the race for the championship final becomes more competitive.

BREASTSTROKE

The ACC has been responsible for six of the last 10 NCAA champions in the two breaststroke distances, and you wouldn’t bet against them sweeping this year either. Alex Walsh seems to be gearing up to swim the 100 at championships this year, and has won the 200 in each of the last three years. The 100 has been incredibly competitive at the top. Alexis Wenger, Sophie Hansson and Jasmine Nocentini have all been sub-57 swimmers, and either won or been hundredths off an NCAA title.

The 200 actually has one of the strongest trends of any event. Helped not only by Virginia’s depth but also by swimmers such as Duke’s Sarah Foley (now graduated) and Kaelyn Gridley, the finals have been becoming more competitive. Interestingly, other than her freshman year where she finished second to Sophie Hansson in the 200, Kate Douglass never swam breaststroke individually at ACCs.

FLY

There’s been a theme so far with the butterfly events. The 100 has been trending faster top to bottom, as it is here, but the 200 is a bit of an enigma. The winning time has come down a lot, helped by Alex Walsh’s conference and NCAA record last year, but at the same time it’s become easier to make the ‘A’ final.

Cal and Stanford will help with that – they bring in six swimmers between them who would have made that final last year with their times this season – but there are currently 24 swimmers this year in the conference who would have made last year’s ‘A’ final. That’s a lot of internal growth, highlighted by swimmers like Miami’s Ashlyn Massey who’s seeded to make the ‘A’ final after breaking the school record by 2.4 seconds.

In the 100, it’s not only Gretchen Walsh to watch out for: Claire Curzan, Gabi Albiero, Leah Shackley and Torri Huske will all be in the hunt for the podium, in an A-final that could see some big names miss out.

IM

Alex Walsh and Kate Douglass at the top of the 200 IM mean times have stayed fairly stable there, but the ‘B’ and ‘C’ finals are getting much more competitive – less than two seconds separated 8th from 24th last year. Cal and Stanford bring in some big-time medley swimmers in Leah Polonsky, Lucy Bell and Caroline Bricker, who is the latest swimmer to break four minutes in the 400, but there’s improvement within the conference as well. Kimmy Shannon of Pitt has dropped 12 seconds down to 4:10.13 this year to smash Pitt’s school record – and that only ranks her 12th so far this season.

RELAYS

*There have been some big DQs at ACCs, and in relays these can have an outsized effect on the trends. Therefore we’ve included the times of DQ’ed teams

Virginia has absolutely dominated the relays at ACCs under Todd DeSorbo, and somehow continues to get faster. They broke their own American record in the 400 medley at the Eddie Reese showdown and have the tools to break every relay record on the books. A full-throttle Virginia in the 800 free relay, the only NCAA record they don’t yet hold? We could be looking at a 6:43.

The placings further down show a predisposition for the sprints – the 200-yard relays have the strongest trends –  but there are downward trends in every relay. Don’t be surprised if 1st and 3rd get a lot quicker this year – Cal and Stanford are very strong in the relays, and that will drive teams like NC State and Louisville to be at their best.

IN SUMMARY

The ACC is a lot more than just Virginia. There are big improvements at the top, but they’re matched lower down as well. The Cavalier women have a stranglehold on the whole NCAA right now, let alone the conference, but NC State and Louisville are some of the top teams nationally as well. They’re up there because of improvement across the whole ACC, which could be responsible for half of the top 1010 at NCAAs this year. As the conference becomes more competitive top-to-bottom, there’s no reason to think that Virginia won’t be pushed to be even faster than they already have been.