A favorite off-season exercise of coaches and fans of swimming at the high school and college level is to tally up “returning points” for the contenders – checking how many of each team’s point scorers will graduate before the next season and how many of each team’s points are slated to come back.
A full year or so out from the next taper meet there are plenty of unknown variables in play, but it’s still about the best bet for seeing what kind of shape each team might be in come next season.
But how accurate do returning points actually turn out to be? Let’s look at the 2014 NCAA Championships for a closer, more data-driven answer.
First off: a big thanks to Lyle Campbell of Pacific Northwest swimming for compiling the numbers for us. He used the results of the 2013 NCAA Championships to make up totals of “returning” points coming into this season, then added up the points scored at the 2014 NCAA Championships by both those returners and “new” point scorers.
You can see his charts here:
Note: these numbers include all individual events (diving included), but not relay points.
There’s plenty to look at there in terms of which individual point-scorers and teams were most successful in getting repeat points from their returning scorers. But for now, let’s look at things on a very macro level, checking out the overall point totals to see how sure a bet “returning” points are.
A word first about sources of error. Taking these numbers as a definitive statement on how many athletes regress from point scorers to also-rans probably isn’t wise. Not only do these numbers include athletes who scored one year and failed to score the next, they also include athletes who scored in 2013 but didn’t compete in 2014 for any number of reasons – injury, transfer, ineligibility and so on. In fact, probably the biggest single loss of returning points was sustained by USC with 2013 double-individual winner Vlad Morozov turning pro after his junior season.
But in determining how accurate “returning points analyses” are in predicting the coming season, all of those factors have an impact, so it’s worth including them and looking at the numbers as a whole.
In addition, athletes are classified as “returners” or “new scorers” for each individual event. So an athlete who scores in the 50 free in 2013 is considered a “returner” only in the 50 free. If he scores 100 free points the following year, those are classified as “new” points, since he wasn’t a returning point-scorer in the event.
That means that athletes who switch events can mess up the numbers a bit. This isn’t terribly common (how many teams have the luxury of trying a returning NCAA point-scorer in a different event?), but does have an impact. One example would be Florida’s Sebastien Rousseau, who scored in the 500 free in 2013, but swam the 200 IM in 2014.
Probably the most interesting part of this aggregate analysis is the numbers on how many NCAA points actually come from returners. In 2014, returning point scorers scored 1363.5 points out of a total 2479 individual points in the meet. That comes to just about 55%, with the other 45% coming from “new” point scorers, or athletes who didn’t score in 2013.
| Totals | Points | Percentage |
| 2014 points from “returners” | 1363.5 | 55.00% |
| 2014 “new” points | 1115.5 | 45.00% |
| Total Individual Points | 2479 |
That means that, based on this year’s numbers at least, when looking at returning points, we should view them as roughly half of the total points in play the following year. That’s a majority and a significant percentage to be sure, but also means every team will likely have to lean heavily on new scorers to supplement their returning points enough to outdo the competition.
The anecdotal evidence for this is pretty clear as well. Look at how many of the 2014 NCAA Champs weren’t even in the meet one year earlier: Kristian Gkolomeev & Brad Tandy (50 free), Michael Hixon (1-meter and 3-meter diving), Ryan Murphy (100 and 200 back). That’s 5 out of 16 individual events, and that’s just looking at event winners – the impact of “new” point scorers only goes up as you move further down the results.
So returning point-scorers made up a little more than half of points scored in 2014. But statistically, how many of a team’s projected returning scorers can a coach count on to actually return to score points in the event the next season?
The numbers say it might be somewhere around 2 out of every 3. The chart below shows the projected returning point scorers and their 2013 points compared to how many of them scored in 2014 and how many total points they all put up this season.
| Total swims | Total points | |
| Underclassmen scoring in 2013 | 188 | 1847 |
| “Returners” scoring in 2014 | 123 | 1363.5 |
| Percent successfully returning | 65.43% | 73.82% |
So, based on our numbers, there were 188 point-scoring swims by underclassmen in 2013, that means 188 swims projected to return and score points in 2014. Of those 188, only 123 successfully returned to score one year later. That’s about a 66% success rate (which, as mentioned above, includes all factors like injury, ineligibility, and transfers in addition to a regression in swimming performance). In terms of total points, of 1847 points by underclassmen in 2013, 1363.5 returned in 2013, a percentage of almost 74. It makes sense that this percentage would be higher, as the athletes who do return to score a year later are likely to score more points the second time around.
We had plenty of discussion during this year’s ultra-fast NCAA meet about how difficult it’s become to score points at the national level. (A 1:43.6 just to qualify top 16 in the 200 IM? C’mon!). And this is more proof that as the meet gets faster and faster each season, returning points become less and less of a sure thing.
It’s only likely to get harder, too, as the great crop of age group swimmers in the U.S. at the moment start to enter the college scene, leading to more situations like Murphy at Cal, who put up a legitimate Swimmer-of-the-Year-type season in his first go at the big dance.
It’s the college off-season now, which means we’ll no doubt start seeing the “returning points” stats being thrown around for both men and women in combination with discussion about each team’s incoming freshman classes. Though conventional wisdom might suggest putting a bigger emphasis on the former, 2014 statistics seem to tell us that those incoming freshmen (plus transfers and current collegians who take a big step forward in 2015) might be equally dangerous in the total 2015 score column.