Premature Look: Returning Points for 2014 Women’s NCAA Championships

Nothing gets our readers more fired up than college swimming, and just because NCAA’s are over, doesn’t mean that the fun has to stop. While we have a few days still to wait before the next round of recruits begin signing in the normal signing period, it’s never too early to start looking ahead to next year’s NCAA Championships.

We’ll start with the women, where the Georgia Bulldogs are the defending champions. Looking at a very early rundown of what each of the top 10 teams are returning, the results show that none of the teams are really hit all that hard by graduations; the most affect among the top 10 are the Georgia women, and even then they still have more returning individual points than anybody else in the country, include both of their NCAA-qualifying divers.

Florida, USC, and Texas A&M all return more individual points than this year’s third-place team Tennessee. The Volunteers, though, made so much of their money on the relays this year: winning the first three of the meet (which, if you recall, are their first three in program history). The Florida Gators set up especially well for next year: their only impact graduation is Jamie Bohunicky, though she didn’t score as well individually as a senior as she did as a junior, so there’s only one relay swim lost there at the NCAA level.

USC also returns a bunch of individual points as well even though they were just 7th at NCAA’s, though keep in mind that they DQ’ed their 400 free relay, and without that would’ve probably been at least one spot higher in the team standings.

This year’s women’s NCAA Championship meet was a wild one for scoring; based on returning points, next year’s could be even crazier. Look at how few points the teams at the bottom of the top 10 graduate. For USC, those points belong to Haley Anderson. For Stanford, they belong to Andie Murez. For Texas, it’s Laura Sogar. For Minnesota, it’s Haley Spencer. After that, the individual scoring remains basically in-tact for those teams, and the challenge will be just to find some new relay contributors.

The relay losses, overall, will have a much bigger impact on the meet’s outcome next season.

Cal and Florida relied more on freshmen for their relays than anyone else and so next year with the experience of so many NCAA finals behind them, they’ll have to be better. Cal scored a lot of relay points this year (152); Florida has more upward mobility for their group (they scored only 124). The Gators, with so many points returning, are probably one great sprinter away from being national title contenders. On both their 200 and 400 free relays, they had one leg that really cost them top 3-4 finishes. Based on the recruiting class that we know about so far, that last good sprinter will have to come from inside the program, as their top recruits (Danielle Valley and Taylor Katz) are both distance swimmers.

Arizona doesn’t lose a ton of individual scoring, but it is relatively significant, and with the losses of Megan Lafferty and Lauren Smart, plus others, they lose 10 finals relay spots. That’s roughly half, and with it goes a lot of the relay flexibility that Arizona had to switch swimmers out between prelims and finals. Margo Geer is really a big relay equalizer, though, and with Megan Romano graduating, there’s not a whole lot of swimmers left who can match her speed on an anchor (though two freshmen, Natalie Hinds from Florida and Faith Johnson from Tennessee, showed flashes of that same greatness).

We’ll delve further into recruiting classes later, but the teams among the top 10 that probably will see the biggest immediate impact from their freshman are Georgia and Cal. The rich get richer. With incoming and outgoing netted out, Stanford is at worst a wash with the graduation of Andi Murez (who had a fantastic championship meet) and the addition of Olympia Lia Neal.