It's time for the NCAA to switch to LCM; a Manifesto
Former Member
I believe that the US team has been hurt by the NCAA continuing to stick with the SCY format. I believe that the fact that fewer and fewer college athletes are making the team is partially because college athletes are trained to race SCY (of course there are several other reasons for the shift as well). Here's a summary of why I think sticking with SCY is silly:
1. LCM requires specific training and experience to race optimally. Starts and turns are somewhat deemphasized, pacing and rhythm are made even more important. You often see relatively inexperienced US swimmers crushing walls but then losing time between the flags (Tom Shields springs to mind). I believe this is partially a result of focusing on short course. Most NCAA teams train long course on occasion, but it needs to be the focus.
2. I believe that part of the reluctance to go LCM is that the NCAA feels it may discriminate against programs without their own LCM facility. This shouldn't be a concern any more. At this point every major DI program has an LCM facility (or several LCM facilities). Many (the majority?) of quality DII and DIII programs have LCM facilities. The NCAA should stop worrying about upsetting a minority of members, bite the bullet and say they're going LCM.
3. SCY is the Galapagos of swimming formats: it was developed in a vacuum and exists only in the US. LCM is the world standard. SCY to LCM time conversions are very suspect. The excitement of NCAA championships would be much enhanced if the times were comparable to other times around the world. This would improve the prestige of the conference and the meet and improve the centrality of the NCAA in the world swimming landscape. It would also remove one of the (smaller) concerns that foreign talent may have for training in the US. IMO, the US needs to swim and train with the best at all times to ensure it stays competitive. Moving to LCM will enhance their ability to do so.
All of these points are debatable. I'd be interested to see what other people think.
I think some earlier posts hit the nail on the head...this is more about the rise of the professional swimmer. Males especially seem to peak in their mid or even late 20's if given the opportunity to train on an elite level.
Even a dedicated college swimmer has other things to distract from or focus on instead.
Looking at the top 16 women's and men's teams from the 2012 Div III Championships, the following schools do not have 50-meter facilities. That's a lot.
WOMEN
6th: Johns Hopkins
7th: College of NJ
9th: Claremont-Mudd-Scripts
10th: Grove City
11th: Gustavus
13th: Amherst
14th: Hamilton
15th: UW LaCrosse - ?? - no info on web site
16th: Rowan - ?? - no info on web site
MEN
5th: Redlands
6th: Amherst
7th: Johns Hopkins
9th: UW Stevens Point
10th: Staten Island
12th: College of NJ
13th: Kalamazoo
14th: Gettysburg
14th: Whitworth
16th: Washington and Lee
By what measure? In the history of Olympic swimming the US has won 489 total medals. Australia is second with 168. The US has won 214 gold medals out of the 489 total awarded. In 2008 the US won 12 golds and Australia was second with 6. The US won 31 of the 104 medals awarded and the percentage would probably be higher if three swimmers per nation were allowed in the individual events. Is there another sport where any single country has been as dominant at the Olympics?
Exactly. Not to mention if it was such a hinderance why do so many international elites swim NCAA ?
My two cents': LCM is swimming, SCY is racing. Racing is more exciting than swimming.
I would guess that if you polled current and former NCAA D1 swimmers and asked them, "did you like SCY, or would you have preferred to swim LCM year 'round?", only a small minority (distance swimmers) would have said "no, give me LCM year 'round".
YMMV.
Long and short course bring out different skills. I think having collegians compete in both would probably be best. SC hones turns, underwaters and sprints. LC is better for developing stroke technique, especially over distance. Good confidence builder too.
We're not as strong above the 200s as we are below. That might be attributable to so much time in SC. I'm afraid we might get schooled a bit in London by low-stroke-count efficiency freaks like Sun Yang and Park Tae Hwan. Their technique is a peek into the future, and I'm sure they didn't learn it doing SC.
Slightly off-topic, I do believe that training and racing as much LC as possible makes stronger swimmers, especially for us masters. There's an extra 89' between SCY and LCM, and the more you make that length your norm, the more short course feels like assisted swimming, bouncing off walls.
My two cents': LCM is swimming, SCY is racing. Racing is more exciting than swimming.
WTF. How is swimming not racing? What do you think goes on in swimming races?
I would like to see actual swimming, not underwater kicking exhibitions.
Not arguing against the point that LCM training could help in terms of an Olympic-directed concept, but wanted to point you to analysis done by Jeff Commings shortly after the end of the final night of Trials:
www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/.../31113.asp
The men's team is the only one with a lack of younger talent from the collegiate scene - not the women.
The professionalization of the sport, which has supported male athletes more than female athletes (like almost all other sports other than perhaps beach volleyball), likely is the reasoning behind less college swimmers making it on the men's side.
Basically, compared to previous teams, where post-grads usually only stuck around for a year or two more to make a team, now you have post-grads going through 2, and sometimes 3, Olympic cycles after their college career. The only way you get to stick around though, is if you are already Olympic caliber.
So, most of those spots that used to be voided when people graduated and retired from the Olympic part of the sport after college, are no longer voided. So, the collegiate swimmers then have to battle the veterans that are already there, instead of just each other for spots.
Does that make sense?
Exactly. Not to mention if it was such a hinderance why do so many international elites swim NCAA ?
Indeed. Check this out:
www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/.../31262.asp
the money quote is in the fourth paragraph
Jeff> How many swimmers have long term careers in swimming?!?
Ande> Not many.
Surely there must be some statistics somewhere? Might USAS be able to query a database of its membership and cough something up?
This doc gives some insight: www.usaswimming.org/.../Statistics-2011 Rev 2-2-11.pdf
In 2011, there were 291,182 Year-round athlete members of USA-S. The average age is 12 and half. After the age of 11 the number of members drops each year. There were only 10,960 swimmers 19+. Completely guessing here, but I'd say 9,000 of those are between the ages of 19-23. Obviously, there are a lot of kids who swim in college and no longer register for USA-S, so that accounts for a lot of the drop-off. But if they didn't swim in the summer when they were in college, I doubt they would come back after they graduate.
Another interesting stat: Number of year-round athletes that have been registered for 10 or more consecutive years – 10,816!!! That seems crazy low to me. Count me as one!
My LSC had 5,848 swimmers last year. There are probably 5 or fewer swimmers over the age of 25 registered with USA-S each year in our LSC.
So there are 3 events over 200 yards, and here is how we've done in the past four Olympics:
400 free men: 3 medals (all bronze) out of 12 possible
1500 free men: 2 medals (silver, bronze)
400 IM men: 8 medals (4 gold, 3 silver, 1 bronze)
400 free women: 4 medals (gold, 2 silver, bronze)
800 free women: 4 medals (2 gold, 2 bronze)
400 IM women: 3 medals (2 silver, 1 bronze)
I'm not going to do the work to figure out if this is statistically worse than our performance in other events, though I'll go out on a limb and assert that we're not doing too badly in the men's 400 IM (and likely to go 1-2 in London).
It seems like some of the USA's weakest events are the 50 and 100 free for both men and women, which runs counter to the OP's suggestion that SCY should make us faster in the sprints.
