Hi there,
I have posted occasionally regarding my son playing lacrosse in college but we have lately started considering swimming instead.
He is a good lacrosse player and has always emphasized his lacrosse development while swimming in the off season…has gotten interest from a good number of college coaches for lacrosse but we wonder if he is leaning toward the wrong sport…All of his friends tend to be swimmers and lacrosse seems sometimes like a “job” he must work at…he seems to love the challenge of swim and he likes the concreteness of times and effort.
He swims from Sept 1-March 7 essentially and does not get in the pool otherwise. He has some pretty good stats…but he is mainly a sprinter…at age 14 he swam the 50 free in 22.14. He is now a 15 yr old sophomore…back in the pool and loving it once again…We wonder if we should be considering the notion of making swim the “main” sport and having lacrosse take a back seat. If only he could do both in college! But I think even at division 3 this would be terrible difficult to do. Basically, wondering if anyone could tell me if this time at his age and with the limited time he puts in is competitive? I think that if he has a great season this year, it will get him thinking. I want to have some idea of how to guide him…realistically, if he become a year round swimmer?
Thanks for any insight
Theresa
no competitive athletes in this house. but S19 swam in high school; we know some kids who swim d3; and also d1 from his swim days. They practiced day-in and day-out all through high school.
Your 14 yr old has a nice time. Perhaps try talking to some club coaches and see what they think about college swimming; and how their kids have done in the past. My guess is that they’d want him swimming club right away. Hope his season goes well!
What does your son want to do? That’s really the big question. My son walked off the varsity baseball field his sophomore year and said I am going all in for swimming. He had previously swam from the fall until March but figured out he was a better swimmer part-time than a baseball player. He’s behind on the current recruiting class due to his lack of hard training for several years but hoping for some big times this season in his taper meets. It’s a gamble and your son needs to be all in that he will need to train hard to get the attention from college coaches. My son is training much harder than he ever did in baseball but this is something he really wants. Splitting sports during high school is very difficult if you want to make a D1 program.
If he swam that time as a freshman, then he’s got a pretty good chance of pulling off college swimming by junior/senior year. Just be wary that most people want to sprint freestyle, though; he would either have to get really good at freestyle, swim distance, or find another specialty stroke to be a college swimmer (being a breaststroker, I may be biased). That said, colleges vary, and some (not all! I am well aware) schools will take just about anybody they can get.
Don’t worry much about recruitment until the end of sophomore year, when you want to find the swim teams-- and colleges-- that fit. Start contacting coaches mid to late junior year… they will probably respond quicker if you contact them after NCAA championships, in my personal experience. In the rising senior summer, make sure to talk to coaches when you visit schools. And visit schools. It’s well worth it.
Best of luck from a fellow swimmer!
Side note I just thought of: I know a college swimmer who just graduated from Virginia Tech. He only started swimming his junior year and, while I don’t know the rest of his times, I know his 50 time was 20.19 by Senior year. If your swimmer is new to swimming, he will (hopefully) learn quickly!
You’ll undoubtedly get a few answers on this thread, but here’s one from the parent of a current swimming recruit.
Getting to the punchline first, right now he’s not fast enough to be recruited for swimming, but he very well may be able to get there. First, drop the notion of being ‘fast enough for D3’. The better D3 teams are faster than many D1 teams (at schools that don’t care that much about swimming).
Next, what are you looking for here? Does he simply want to swim at a D3 school? If that’s the case he’ll find one. Or is it that he wants to leverage his swimming to get admitted to a selective academically-great D3 school? In that case he’ll not only need to get a bit faster, but he’ll also have to have good enough academics to go with it.
Go to collegeswimming dot com. In the search bar enter the name of a school in which you’re interested. Go to the ‘times’ tab, and look last year’s men’s times in the sprint events. The 50 free can be a bit misleading, as some of the times there are splits from relays (and are thus faster than a 50 free race). Click on a swimmer, and in his list of races click on to last year’s conference championship finals, and then click on the men’s 50 free. See what it took to qualify for the finals. For instance, if you enter Williams College and end up looking at the last year’s NESCAC finals you’ll see that it took a 21.65 to qualify. That’s one benchmark to look at in terms of being recruited. If your son can swim a 21.65 he can score points in the conference championship. That’s what a coach is looking for.
My son’s swimming will hopefully gain him admission to a school that he loves that is difficult to get into even though he already has the academics to do so – it’s just that these schools have admit rates in the teens. That’s the case for most CC kids who are looking at being recruited to D3. Again, not just about the times. They’re looking for the right school with the right team where swimming can gain them admission.
There is a double-edge sword to him not swimming year-round presently. My understanding is that college coaches like kids who are not over-trained in high school. So that may play in his favor. But if he’s considering swimming he might want to strongly consider going year-round at some point before his junior year, as it’s USA meet times that the coaches will be looking at. You may get different opinions on this (on this thread).
And of course he should like swimming, a lot, if he wants to be recruited. My son embraces the discipline and the work, and he loves the camaraderie of his teammates. He would be miserable swimming so many yards if that weren’t the case.
Best of luck. Keep us posted.
There are some excellent posts by eatondad on NESCAC swimming, whose daughter swam at Williams. One point that he makes is that the top NESCAC teams focus on NCAA championships and not conference championships. For that reason, a better estimate of what it takes to swim there is to look at their swimmer’s times at NCAAs.
I thought that relay splits weren’t shown on collegeswimming.com unless they were for the first leg. I am surprised that the times for the other three legs would be listed without some mention that they weren’t from a flat start.
As others have stated, a seasonal swimmer that went 22.14 at 14 has a lot of potential.
I guess I’ll go further than anyone else here and say that 22.14 is really fantastic for a part-time 14 year old swimmer. Growing in length and muscle strength is very important for a sprinter’s development and just that alone should help your son improve. And since he’s only 14, that should naturally happen. Then if he spent more time working on technique throughout the whole year, he has a chance for big improvement. As a parent I would be excited for his chances going forward and could see his development helping him get into a school he really likes.
Of course things can go awry very easily with things like injuries or just boredom, but there’s no question there’s a lot of potential there. I have known some other part-time sprinters that had difficulty doing well in anything above 50 yards at first, but nearly all were able to get some great times in the 100 free and above too. It’s important to be able to do that since a coach wants a sprinter to be able to help on all the 200 and 400 yard relays.
Good luck to your son as he goes through the process of making the decision to swim full-time or not. Truthfully, he may be able to continue with lacrosse as his main sport and still get recruited for swimming. I do know of one kid who was the football star at his school and just swam part-time. He ultimately ended up at Stanford with help from his swimming. Of course he was an incredible athlete who swam the 50 free right around 20.50 his senior year.
Wow!! Thank you all for taking the time to write such thoughtful responses…tons to think about here. But, I am taking away the thought that swimming in college could be a real possibility for him if that is what he wants. Right now he is swimming 5 times a week with his YMCA team and then will bump up to 8 times with high school team so we will just see what this new season brings…if he starts thinking seriously about swim we will encourage him and support that but it has to be what he wants 
I will swing back around to this thread for sure in spring to let you all know the outcome of his sophomore season …again, many many thanks for your opinions and insights…its hard when you are the parent to be objective and even harder when you don’t actually know much about the sport!!
Enjoy the weekend
Theresa
I agree with the concensus here that your son’s sprint time at that age is quite promising. With training, he’ll will probably get under 21 seconds in the next year. That’s definitely recruitable for DIII. Keep in mind that, with the need for freestyle sprinters for relays, coaches put a premium on them. And a 20.5 or below will likely put him in the top 16 going into the DIII NCAA nationals.
Good luck with it, and keep us posted!
I meant to suggest that he’d get under 22 seconds.
Vassar and Skidmore are two colleges where I know swimmers who have partipated in a second collegiate sport. The support of the coach and the teammates are essential to make this work. I know two part time swimmers in high school who swam D3 and broke school records. The breaks actually helped their swimming-they were not burnt out.