Stepping Into The Future: A New Path To NCAA Qualification?

We’d like to give huge thanks to Nick Lakin and Ben Colin, both of Northern Iowa University, for both data and insights here as well as Michael Travis, a former coach at John Hopkins University

One of the key takeaways from the annual CSCAA meetings that took place last weekend was a group of coaches advocating for increased mid-major access to the NCAA Championships:

“Top mid-major programs continue to advocate for championship access via automatic qualifiers. One of the more interesting points they made is that mid-major swimmers can be active fans and drive ratings – one coach said his team watched NCAA Championships when they had a swimmer there, but not when they didn’t.”

This brings up two important points; regarding both the performance and marketability of the sport. Mid-majors are a huge market that don’t get much of a seat at the top table in swimming. The majority of top-100 athletes are within the Power 4, and that is evident when it comes to the NCAA championships. Less than 10% of individual qualifiers come from these programs, which represent 28 conferences; 26/281 for women and 18/235 for men.

Swimming has struggled slightly to expand its mainstream appeal recently. Dreams of the ISL becoming an annual top-tier league with a broadcasting deal and marketable narratives were shattered in March 2022 when Season 4 was cancelled, but in truth its appeal had already begun to decline. Many top stars sat out after Tokyo, as the reality of a competition-heavy autumn series set in.

As a comparison with the athletics Diamond League, the world knows when Mondo Duplantis breaks a World Record. Coleman Stewart’s 100 backstroke World Record, a phenomenal swim driven by exceptional underwaters, barely registered for the casual fan. That is not a sports league going from strength to strength.

The way to expand may then be laterally rather than vertically. More eyes on swimming as a whole, more people invested in what is happening in their conferences and at their schools. People connect with basketball, football and soccer at every level because they can live and breathe the agonies and ecstasies; these sports are both highly visible and the narratives well-crafted.

In swimming, those highs and lows are far less common for the simple reason that there are very few major competitions per year; there is a much smaller pool (pun not intended) of performances. The emotions of your school relay out-touching a rival for third place at a conference championships are no less than watching the US National team do the same, and arguably more relatable. Those are the stories that will bring people into the sport, and they gain appeal when the swimmers involved have more visibility and structured support.

In that vein, a system of qualification for swimming Conference Champions could be an absolute boon. There would be a narrative at a host of meets in February, and the prize on offer is one that matters to Athletic Departments. If putting together a winning team at conferences gets you straight to the national stage, there’s an incentive to do just that, and makes the conference championships that rarest of things in swimming, an event.

Here is the proposal: If a conference champion, any conference champion, in winning the final of an event at their conference championships is faster than a set time then they qualify for NCAAs in that event.

There will be arguments for and against, but if something is universally popular it usually is because it doesn’t really change anything. We’ve discussed why it would be important to have more importance attached to these conference meets, so the place to go next is with how you would structure that qualifying process. Luckily, there is already a foundation we can use here; the NCAA ‘B’ cut

Setting a Standard

The B cut is currently determined as the three-year average of the 125th-ranked swimmer in the NCAA. We often see more than 125 swimmers hit the B cut in a season; a nice sign of progression in the sport. One possibility could be dropping the ‘B’ cut down, and using the ‘B’ cut as the qualification standard for conference champions.

Dropping the cut itself down to the 64th-ranked swimmer (matching the number at which many other sports cut off for championships) would knock around 1.5% off the time across the board.

That would not affect the swimmers qualifying or leave people at home who otherwise would make the championship. Remember, the ‘B’ cut actually has no material effect on the number of swimmers at NCAAs or the qualification of those swimmers.

A note on using 64; it does not make as much sense in an individual-based sport like swimming as it does in a team based on like basketball (although that NCAA championship is now 68 teams), but any sign-off would be done by the NCAA administration. Being in line with other sports, especially when the issue is about the qualification of conference champions, may garner more support from them than it otherwise might. 

What is affected by the ‘B’ cut is the number of swims an athlete can add. Whilst a small number qualify directly in three events, most secondary or tertiary events are added through the qualifying in one and then having one or two further events under the ‘B’ cut. Any athlete qualified individually to the meet has the right to add events in which they have ‘B’ cuts up to the three-event maximum.

Dropping the ‘B’ cut in 2025 would have lost 11% of all swims on the men’s side, and 15% on the women’s: not huge, but a reasonable fraction. There are few swimmers who rise from this far down the psych sheets to score, but it does happen – think Destin Lasco in 2021.

There would be a further knock-on effect from this. This is the final meet of the NCAA season, targeted by a lot of the colleges attending as their main taper meet of the season. The secondary or tertiary events are more than a nice bonus for these swimmers; they are an opportunity to throw a swim down in a new or neglected event. Lessons can be learnt and new strengths identified. Seeing swimmers drop chunks of time in the early heats adds to the meet, and would be missed.

Additionally, ‘B’ cuts are something to strive for even at programs that aren’t sending swimmers to NCAAs. These are recognised, celebrated, seen as a mark of high achievement. These are difficult times when left where they are currently; dropping the number of swimmers achieving them would probably be a net negative.

A Third Cut

A solution: maintain the B cut as is, but set a stiffer standard as a ‘Conference Champion’ cut. Any conference champion, Power 4 or Mid-Major, who hits the cut in their title-winning swim automatically qualifies. Post-cut, conference champions can then add events in which they have a ‘B’ cut, just like any other qualifier, to the meet under the current rules.

It’s a neat solution, one that adds avenues to qualify and doesn’t affect swimmers once they are qualified for the championship. One aspect to consider of adding a third cut would be how the cut line is determined. The hierarchy of qualifiers would look something like this:

1. Swimmers with the ‘A’ cut
2. Conference champions with the ‘Conference Champion’ cut
3. Swimmers with the ‘B’ cut until the athlete cap has been hit

The filling up of events to ensure they have the same number of qualifiers, which currently happens after step 1, would shift to take place after step 2. The new cut fits in cleanly with the current system.

Steps 2 and 3 could switch around as well; the cut line is taken as:

Athlete cap – number of eligible conference champions

and the events filled up until that point, with the champions then added which could be slightly cleaner. Likely most of the Power 4 champions would qualify for NCAAs under the cut-line rather than via this new route. Another alternative could be to keep the current qualification as is and then take any conference champions not already qualified as additional swimmers on top, potentially as non-reimbursed participants.

Looking towards the actual event in March, it would be fair to say that the current goal for most top mid-major swimmers is qualification for, rather than peaking at, NCAAs. This change would shift that slightly; you would still need to win your conference in a fast-enough time; but once you had done so the focus would be purely on NCAAs, not last chance meets.

18 mid-major swimmers qualified on the men’s side this year, with 49 swims between them. Only eight of those swims were faster than the entry time, as individual mid-major swimmers as a whole picked up 90 points after being seeded for 133.

The Women did fare better both in points and times, climbing 40 from a seed of 12 and dropping time in a third of events (22 out of 66).

The following tables demonstrate how the Conference Champion cuts would have looked for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, and what their projection would be for next year. Also included is the change to the 2025 invited times if this system had been used and the cut line had been determined as outlined above; you’ll see that they barely change.

In addition, any additional qualifiers for 2025 are noted along with schools and conferences that did not have representation at this meet, but would have done so under this system.

Men’s Conference Champion Cuts: 2024-2026

Men’s Additional Qualifiers

*Queens still has one more year to run on their four-year transitional period before joining Division 1 after voting to do so in 2022. We have not included them in the invited time calculations or number of new schools referenced later.

There would have been 22 men from 18 different schools (16 new) qualifying via this route if this had been in force in 2024-25; more again than the contingent of 18 than actually qualified.

Women’s Conference Champion Cuts: 2024-2026

Women’s Additional Qualifiers

23 additional women would have qualified from 19 different schools, 10 of them new and representing 14 conferences.

A Work In Progress

As with all changes, the numbers would be run and run again to find the best way to determine any new or updated cut. A middle ground would need to be struck between creating new opportunities and flooding the championship with conference champions.

This may help with parity across the NCAA as well. Swimming is one of the most top-heavy sports in the collegiate system, with team and individual championships dominated by a small group of schools. With roster limits on Power 4 schools from next season mid-majors are already a more attractive proposition; a potential more direct path to NCAA qualification would be a further point of attraction.

One strong facet of this qualification system is that it would be applicable to champions from all 32 Division 1 conferences. The SEC men’s 50 free winner this year, Jordan Crooks, would have hit the wall and immediately earned a spot at the meet, just like Loyola’s Caleb Kelly would have done upon winning the event in the Patriot League.

Crooks was a foregone conclusion for qualification. If we were to be fastidious, he qualified back in November at the Tennessee invitational with a trio of ‘A’ cuts. However as an organiser, promoter or even a casual fan, having an ‘A’ final winner hit the wall and the scoreboard flash up ‘NCAA QUALIFIER’ would only add to the event.

You would have great interviews. You could have a posterboard of all Conference champions that qualify, like in Basketball. You could figure out a way to get the signatures of every qualifying conference champion and create a signed wall or poster like at US Trials. It can be silly. Silly is interesting. Silly gets people watching.

This is a clear avenue of growth for swimming. Swim meets are, in general, not the best at hooking casual fans: multi-day meets, long sessions and a format that results in most of the excitement happening during a short window of the total event (finals). Compare that to something like basketball; there are numerous breaks through the game, especially at the professional level, but there is constant entertainment whilst you’re there and a storyline to follow throughout.

That makes what people like Kyle Sockwell are doing so important. Sockwell’s inaugural ‘dual meet tour’, an eight-stop series of events, resulted in multiple crowds of over 1,000 which was driven by a fresh and creative approach.

To quote Northern Iowa coach Nick Lakin, swimming has “for a long time gone through the motions as a sport and failed to make the meets ‘events’.”. It would be difficult to describe that as anything but a nuanced reflection.

Swimming is not a high-revenue sport. The Japanese Soccer third division brought in over double the revenue that USA swimming did in 2023. The absolute top swimmers swimming fast has always happened and will continue to happen. The path to growth is to make people care about swimming at all levels. A focus on times alone won’t do that; stories, narratives and spectacles will.

Looking Forward

To go back to the cuts themselves, one thing that the current system does deal with well is season-to-season variability. There was a pretty sizable drop in time for 2021-22 compared to 2020-2021, and using a three-year average extends the effect of that into the 2023-24 season cuts. The current ranking system of qualifiers ensures that does not result in an explosion in the number of qualifiers.

Setting an absolute qualifying time prior to the season, however, commits you to that time regardless of the number of swimmers. That could give weight to the proposal earlier of not counting swimmers qualified through the ‘Conference Champion’ path towards the 281 (women) or 235 (men) athlete cap.

A potential solution could be to drop the ranking lower still, say into the 50s, or to put it at just the previous year’s 64th-ranked swimmer rather than taking the three-year average. However with 2020-21 times dropping off the books for last season, the number of qualifiers for both men and women would drop by around a third compared to 2023-24 to hover just above 20 for 2024-25.

That seems about right; the number is not overwhelming, but there is a good core of swimmers who would get the opportunity to compete in March. More importantly, 23 different schools from 14 new conferences would have a very big reason to care more about NCAAs; and their Athletic Departments would have a very good reason to take more of an interest in swimming.

In a time of uncertainty for a whole range of sports at the collegiate level, that interest is crucial. Under this system Cal Poly would have had two swimmers at NCAAs this past season, their first qualifiers for a decade. Instead, they no longer have a swim team.