Update: It sounds like Sebatier wasn’t able to get pushed through compliance for the 2012-2013 season, much like his countrymate and counterpart at Texas Imri Ganiel is struggling with. Both are probably shooting for a Sectionals taper meet, rather than an NCAA taper meet, in year one.
Israeli swimming is on somewhat of an upswing in their national ranks, and NCAA programs more-and-more are becoming the beneficiaries of the new talent coming out of the country. The latest heading stateside is sprinter Or Sebatier, an 18-year old who was added to the Texas A&M roster this spring.
Sebatier is a sprinter, something that this A&M program always covets, and comes in with bests of 23.3 and 51.8 in the long course 50 and 100 freestyles. To this point of his career, he’s been much better in long course than short course, but those times conservatively convert to a 46-low and a 20-mid in yards.
For a comparison of the impact, though maybe not immediate, Sebatier’s best 50-meter time is similar to that of John Murray, the biggest signing in Texas’ freshman class in the 2012-2013 season (though Murray has much better results in the 100).
The Israeli has also put up some big-time relay swims, including a 50.70 split at European Juniors on a 4th place relay that also included Stanford freshman Tom Kremer, and has been as low as a 22.86 on a 200 free relay.
Though those are relay swims, A&M coach Jay Holmes has built his program on relays, so a swimmer who can be a full second faster on a relay than a flat-start in a 100 will be immensely valuable to this program.
Good to see the recruiting is still rolling along at A&M. What people outside of the program don’t ever here about, however, is HOW CRITICAL Doug Boyd has been to that program since he came there when Jay took over for Mel Nash.
He is a very creative and knowledgeable coach with a great background of training guys who nobody knew about swim fast as Mel did, but I think the big difference between he and Mel is that Doug KNOWS how to get them to swim fast at NCAA’s, at the right time! That wasn’t always the case in College Station before. He also is a very good recruiter and has flown all over the world to get… Read more »
ExAg, I will have to agree with you on “most” of your points! I have known DB for many a year. He has been getting kids to go fast since he was at UCSD. He also got lowly Rice to top-eight a relay at NC’s and had the runner-up in the 50 to the Georgia girl the next year (can’t remember her name..maybe Auburn?).
BUT, if you look at the results at A&M over the past five or six years one would see that DB has coached almost all of their top all-times in the shorter events post Mel Nash, so to just say he has done as well “as Mel did” is robbing him!. Also, IMO, the sign of… Read more »
According to the results of the tri-dual in Hawaii last weekend it looks like the badgers have added international swimmers Shelby Wilson (nz) and Nicholas Schafer (aus) to their roster. Pretty impressive for Whitney hite!! He’s definetly building a great program up in Wisconsin!