Sure, we’re all still just catching our collective breath after a rowdy month of international swimming coverage. (Certainly the writers getting up at all hours of the night and morning to cover the meets are!) But as we all well know, swimming never takes breaks – and neither do its fans.
College swim season begins before we know it – the first dual meet is scheduled for September 14, just over two weeks away – and we at SwimSwam have been cooking up a feast of pre-season coverage. Here’s what to watch for over the coming weeks:
NCAA Recruiting Class Rankings
Sure, we’ve already ranked out the top individual recruits in the high school class of 2018. Then we ranked them again with their senior seasons taken into account. Then we ranked out the next recruiting class, the ones just now beginning their senior seasons of high school. Oh yeah, and then we just overkilled the whole premise by researching ‘way too early’ ranks on the insanely talented high school classes of 2020.
But that doesn’t mean our recruiting coverage is done. Far from it. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be ranking the top 12 recruiting classes in the nation by team – looking at which programs pulled the best instant-impact freshman to boost their rosters for the coming season. You can check out our very first ranking of the men’s classes #9-#12 here, with more to come.
College Swimming Previews
In addition, we’ll be previewing the top men’s and women’s teams in the nation in our annual College Swimming Previews series. There’s one big change to our format this year: traditionally, we preview the top 12 teams in finish order from last year’s NCAAs. But this year, we’re using our College Swimming Previews to double as the de facto edition of our first Power Rankings – we’re previewing the top 12 teams based on our own power rankings for the upcoming season.
Watch for those to kick off later this week and run through the month of September. You can follow all our previews in our College Swimming Previews channel here.
College Preview Magazine
If all that college swimming coverage isn’t enough for you (or if you don’t want to wait a month to hear our prognosis on the Stanford women post-Ledecky, or if you want a beautiful keepsake or coffee-table read), check out the upcoming College Preview issue of SwimSwam Magazine.
Stanford star Ella Eastin gets the cover of a loaded issue – our magazines typically run 150-200 pages. This fall, we’re including an early look at our NCAA team Power Rankings, covering further than the 12 we’ll get to in our online Previews series. And the magazine also includes the return of our wildly-popular “Top 50 NCAA Swimmers” ranking, running down the top 50 men and women across all Division I NCAA programs.
When can we approximately expect it to hit our snail mail mailboxes? Looking forward to it and the wait seems to drag on…about the only reason to go to the mailbox these days.
Very very soon. My mom said she got hers yesterday, so should be this week for most in the U.S. Thanks for subscribing!