College swim coaches are all strapped for time. Only a handful of programs have big staffs with recruiting coordinators. The rest of the coaches have to do everything themselves, maybe with help from a grad assistant.
The reason our program works is because we save the coaches time in finding and recruiting our swimmers. When we send a swimmer’s info to the coaches we make sure we are not sending them information that is not useful.
Shoe Size
After 13 years of research on what college coaches are looking for in recruits we have found they are all looking for swimmers with big flippers (not rocket science). Most coaches have an idea of what they consider “big feet.” Our research suggests that coaches are looking for guys with size 12 and girls with size 10 or larger.
This doesn’t mean that a swimmer with smaller feet can’t swim in college, but big feet help.
Kicking Ability
So much of college swimming is about strength, power and kicking. Years ago you could find many distance swimmers who utilized a 2-beat kick when they raced. When is the last time you saw a 2-beat kicker in college? We used to believe that swimmers were not capable of maintaining a 6-beat kick throughout a 1650, but swimmers have conditioned themselves to not only maintain a 6-beat kick, but actually utilize the kick for a little propulsion and to help with rhythm and timing. This is true for all four strokes.
We have found that most college level kicking starts with 100’s on a 1:30 interval. Here is what we ask our swimmers and their coaches:
What is the fastest interval you can hold on a set of 5 x 100 kick (yards), without fins?
If the swimmer can hold a 1:30 interval or better, we let the college coaches know; otherwise it becomes useless information.
When I coached at Nebraska we did the following kick set at least once during the first two weeks of practice.
Everyone grab a board. We are going 10 x 100 free kick on a 1:30, leave on top, ready go. The freshmen’s eyes got really big with disbelief. They soon realized that this set was not going away and after a month of kicking a straight 1000 they began to get in shape.
If you want to swim in college, get your legs in shape. They are the largest muscles in your body and there is no reason to drag them around.
Kicking is a mind set. You can choose to be a good kicker or a bad kicker.
The newest piece of information we are going to start providing the college coaches is hand size. We are currently surveying the coaches to determine how they measure hand size what they consider to be a big paddle or anchor.
I will let you know what we find out.
A strong kick also helps a swimmer sit higher in the water causing less water resistance with each stroke.
I have a problem with a very hard working 17 year old if we do kick drills mainly free he comes last there are 10 year olds that beat him but when we use fins he flies he has big hands and size 10 feet he is in top 5 in his age group in free any suggestions please??
I think it’s important to finish a practice the way you finish a race (warmdown afterward, of course): with a very fast swimming-with-fins set that forces the swimmer to a) use the legs and b) train to finish fast..
If you can be as specific as possible to racing strategy as often as possible, then you’re not just swimming; you’re training to race. Naturally, you have to put in easy days so you don’t encourage failing adaptation, but you should always maintain a philosophy that a practice is just a longer race.Otherwise, you should just go to the “Y” for lap swim.
I get the interest in metrics and even the idea of some correlation but swimming performance needs to be viewed from a total systems standpoint. After 45 years of swimming I believe this quote sums my recommended recruiting advice up best “If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers” / Admiral William H McRaven
I am a college swimmer at a competitive D1 school. I am also 5’3 with a shoe size of 7. I am also a sprinter. Kicking is by far my biggest weakness, and I am trying to improve it drastically. However, telling kids that colleges won’t recruit them because their shoe size isn’t up to par is ridiculous. If you have the times, technique, and motivation then no college is going to ignore you just because of your small feet. For any swimmer reading this who has small feet or isn’t the greatest kicker don’t think it’s impossible to be recruited. Just be prepared to work a little harder on kick sets than others. That being said one of my… Read more »
Good point, but please the rest of the article. “This doesn’t mean that a swimmer with smaller feet can’t swim in college, but big feet help.” I should had added, “if you know how to use them.”
Thanks for the article Coach. Going to have my son read it, just to further confirm to him that his coach knows what she is talking about.
What about their times and techniques? If technique is king, shouldn’t it matter most?
I don’t like the absolute proposed here–that swimmers doing longer distances always maintain a 6-beat kick. While this may be true for some or a majority of swimmers, it’s not true for all swimmers. One example is Sun Yang’s 1500m swim at the London Olympics. He starts out with a 6-beat kick. Toward the 800m mark, he does a 2-beat kick. Then he transitions to a 4-beat, finally a 6-beat and faster to end the race. While strong legs are good, I don’t believe the principle in this article is a universal absolute.