Virginia's Class of 2019 / 2023 has been outstanding, with four top-20 recruits all scoring as sophomores and Kate Douglass winning a national title. Archive photo via Jack Spitser/Spitser Photography
It’s our week of NCAA retrospectives, looking back at recruit rankings through the lens of now-updated NCAA scoring data. We’ve focused in on the senior class (after four NCAA seasons) and the freshman class (after their first NCAA showings), and now it’s time to share all of our data for the four classes currently making up the NCAA field.
We’ll also include this year’s freshmen and seniors to have all the data in one post. You can find further analysis of those classes above.
Notes:
The data included is only individual scoring at NCAAs. That’s not an exact measure of an athlete’s contribution to a program: many of these swimmers (and others not listed) were relay scorers at NCAAs, scored significant points at conference meets and provided great leadership and culture-building for their programs. This data isn’t a perfect analysis of the best recruits – it’s merely a quick look at the data we can compile.
Some of these athletes haven’t had as many scoring seasons as others in their class. Some redshirted a season and have more remaining seasons. Some deferred their enrollment as freshmen. Some sat out a year with a transfer. Some turned pro early. Some will turn pro early. Some are hard to pigeonhole into a specific class, international athletes especially. We did our best to group athletes where they best fit. Again, this isn’t a hard-and-fast ranking of value – it’s just the best data we can compile.
The ranks are from our recruit rankings, typically compiled when these athletes were high school juniors. We don’t include internationals in those rankings, as it’s difficult to figure out if and when internationals will join the NCAA and which class they should be grouped with before they appear in the NCAA. Do bear in mind that our rankings were done well over a year before any of these athletes appeared in NCAA competition, so if you do have a quibble with a specific rank, you may want to check how fast that athlete actually was when the ranking was done before you get too livid. Unranked recruits showing massive improvement curves are some of the best stories in the NCAA year-in and year-out, and one reason we rank recruits is so we can better see which athletes had great rises during their college careers.
All that said, compiling these ranks is a lot of data entry and a lot of research. If we missed anyone, or mis-classified anyone with the wrong class or with the wrong domestic/international tag, please let us know in the comments and we’ll update our data as soon as possible!
SENIORS (HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 2017, COLLEGE CLASS OF 2021)
Juniors (High School Class of 2018, College Class of 2022)
This group has had a number of notable redshirt seasons among top 20 recruits.
It’s a strong international class, with the top scorer being Canada’s Maggie MacNeil. #1-ranked Taylor Ruckis also a Canadian national, though she grew up swimming club and high school in the U.S.
The top scorer overall is actually a Class of 2019 recruit: Former #1 Izzy Iveygraduated early and swam NCAAs as a freshman with this class. She’s scored 83 points in two NCAA meets.
This class has won five individual NCAA titles and four of them have come from international recruits. MacNeil has two and Sophie Hanssontwo.
The best unranked recruit has been Alabama’s Rhyan White, who scored 48 points as a junior and was in line to score 51 as a sophomore after not scoring in her rookie year.
Sophomores (High School Class of 2019, College Class of 2023)
We didn’t get to see this class compete as freshmen, but 8 of our top 10 were seeded to score in their rookie NCAA meets.
Virginia did extremely well in this class, with the top two individual scorers (Kate Douglassand Ella Nelson) along with two more individual scorers.
Two of these athletes have already won NCAA titles individually: #1 Douglass in the 50 free and #3 Berkoff in the 100 back.
Izzy Iveywas #1 in this class in the junior ranks, but graduated early and joined the NCAA with the class of 2018. On a per-year basis, she’s scored comparably to Hartman, Berkoff and Pash in the top 10.
It shows both schools like Olivia Carter Georgia/Michigan
Swimfan01
3 years ago
Amazing to see Reilly Tiltmann (‘25) scoring among the highest scoring females thus far in the class above her This has to put her at an incredible advantage in her class next year. Watch out for Tiltmann!
Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though.
Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …
Cora Dupre swims for Alabama, not Indiana
It shows both schools like Olivia Carter Georgia/Michigan
Amazing to see Reilly Tiltmann (‘25) scoring among the highest scoring females thus far in the class above her This has to put her at an incredible advantage in her class next year. Watch out for Tiltmann!
Quite interesting data, lot to unpack, thank you.
Almost every Stanford ranked swimmers is a dud in 2021 or a deferment, so no wonder they had some scoring issues in 2021 champs
I get the point you are trying to make, but I’m not sure I would call a group of freshmen athletes “duds.”
yeah, no disrespect meant, more about limited vocabulary I have.