Am I Fast Enough?
A Definitive Guide to Know What Teams to Aim For
How to Use This Guide
Knowing whether you’re fast enough for your dream school is one of the most common questions we get. We made this guide to give you strategies and tools to evaluate how fast you need to be for certain schools.
Because freshman and sophomores have more time to improve we answer this question for two different groups- freshmen/sophomores, and juniors/seniors. Feel free to look at both, but if you’re a freshman, make sure you don’t apply the senior standards to you.
If you’re a junior or senior, click here to jump ahead to your section!
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Part 1: For Freshmen and Sophomores
When To Think About If You’re Fast Enough
Don’t have time to read all this? Our number one piece of advice for freshmen and sophomores is to make a list with enough variety of schools on it that you could swim at some if you only dropped small amount of times (1 sec in 100) over the next two years, as well as schools that require huge (8+ sec drops in 100) drops over the next two years.
While we don’t suggest basing your list off of whether you think you’ll be fast enough, it’s good to at least think about the question. When making your college list, we suggest you not focus as much on speed, but more focus on commitment required. If you are somebody who wants a super intense experience, then looking at slower D3 schools probably won’t be a good fit for you. At the same time, if you are somebody who likes to have the holidays off, looking at a top 10 D1 program also isn’t right. Think through what sort of commitment you want to make to the sport first.
Bucketing Schools
Note: Due to the changing roster sizes in Division 1, we’ve updated our guidelines to be more conservative. There are simply fewer spots going around, and top D1 schools will create a trickle down effect of faster swimmers going to a wider variety of schools.
Once you find some schools that seem like a good fit for commitment, we suggest bucketing your schools into safety, good fit, and stretch. Here are some guidelines for how to think about those buckets:
By jumping meet cuts we mean qualifying for new meets in the following order:
So, if you are currently qualified for sectionals, a stretch school would require you to improve enough to qualify for Summer Juniors or US Open. These cuts can be found on your local LSC or USA Swimming website. Read on to figure out how to calculate average SwimCloud rank.
The reason we don’t think you should focus too much on times is because of how hard it is to know where you’ll end up timewise in a few years. Some freshmen go from not qualifying for junior champs to making Olympic Trials, while others go their best times in sophomore year. You shouldn’t feel that you need to drop 15 seconds to get to your only dream school, and you also shouldn’t feel that a school that requires a big drop is out of the question. Having multiple dream schools that require different speeds is the answer!
So, feel free to read on to see how we suggest looking at speed for older athletes, but make sure you create a large list of schools, so that no matter what times you go in a few years, you’ll have a program you’re excited about and able to swim at.
Part 2: For Juniors and Seniors
Summary
There are four good ways to know if you’re fast enough:
Ask the coach
Average SwimCloud ranks of past recruits
Conference scoring times
College Swim Connect broad guidelines below
Bucketing Schools
Older swimmers should also bucket their schools, but the thresholds are a bit different, since you have less time to improve. Here are the College Swim Connect buckets:
By jumping meet cuts we mean qualifying for new meets in the following order:
Method 1: Email the Coach
If you are at all in the ball park of being fast enough for a school, a coach will likely reply with exactly the time standards they are looking for, and whether or not you stand a chance of hitting those. This is the best way to get an idea, plus it starts a conversation with a coach. If you’re not in the ball park though, they may not respond.
Method 2: Average SwimCloud Rankings
To do this method, go to the profile of the school you’re interested in on SwimCloud. From there, scroll down until you see commitments, and then click on “More Commitments”.
Once on that page, you can filter by gender and year to see that team’s commitments. You can see each recruit’s ranks on that page.
We suggest you average the last 2-3 year’s recruit rankings and compare it to your own, then use our bucketing methodology to see if you’re a potential fit. Note that some academic schools will have more variability in their rankings because recruits have to meet demanding academic requirements. Also keep in mind that power 4 schools will likely see an increase in their average ranking the next two years as their rosters get smaller.
Method 3: Conference Scoring Times
Most often when you email a coach, they will tell you that they are looking for swimmers with “x” number of conference scoring times. For schools that are conference champions, they are probably looking for swimmers who can arrive and score in multiple events as a freshman. For schools at the bottom of the conference, they are probably looking for swimmers who can score in one to two events as a freshman. You can find these conference times on SwimCloud by searching for the conference name that the school is in.
Method 4: CSC Guidelines
These guidelines are not guarantees or ground truth, as every swimmer and school is different, but these are rough time standards that swimmers are generally hitting at different types of schools. These time standards are typically hit before leaving high school, sometime in the swimmer’s junior or senior year. Keep in mind there is also major variance even within these categories- the slowest Power 5 team varies widely from a D1 11th ranked team.
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