Even after hustling up these numbers last night, we’ll have you know that semi-professional number-cruncher Reed Shimberg still did quite well on his med school exams this morning. Now that those are out of the way, he’s ready to focus on more important things the rest of this weekend: swimming and the 2013 Men’s NCAA Championships.
Click here to see day 1 numbers.
All weekend, he’s tracking the improvements of seed versus swim after we saw such dismal numbers at the last two major U.S. meets: women’s NCAA’s last weekend (aroud 20% from seed to prelims), and the Olympic Trials over the summer.
The numbers at the men’s meet have been much better overall, though you’ll see on Friday things were pretty up and down. Take the 200 medley improvement for what it’s worth, given that roughly half of the teams in the A-final were either swimming less-than-full relays, or intentionally conserving energy for finals. Those numbers will surely increase tonight when we compare seed to “best performance” for the day.
The 200 free had the best turnout, with 42.2% of swimmers improving. That number was much higher than I expected it to be, given the big-name guys that we saw add this morning (a few guys from Michigan, a few guys from Cal, defending champ Dax Hill, and Louisville’s Joao de Lucca). 42% of entrants still improved their seed time though, which is a much higher number than we usually see at NCAA’s. Kudos.
Here’s all the numbers from this morning:
- 200 medley relay: 3 imp, 26 entries, 11.5%
- 400 IM: 11 imp, 33 entries, 33.3%
- 100 Fly: 11 imp, 42 entries, 26.2%
- 200 free: 19 imp, 45 entries, 42.2%
- 100 breast, 9 imp, 39 entries, 23.1%
- 100 back: 14 imp, 42 entries, 33.3%
- TOTAL: 67 imp, 227 entries, 29.5%
- TOTAL REMOVING 200 MEDLEY OUTLIER: 64 imp, 201 entries, 31.8%
*Note: we’ve removed scratches from these lists, which probably skews them slightly higher. On average, we presume that most scratches are done because coaches don’t expect those swimmers to improve entry times. Hard to prove that though.
