Ultra Swim Swimmer of the Month: Paige Madden, Virginia

Ultra Swim Swimmer of the Month is a recurring SwimSwam feature shedding light on a U.S.-based swimmer who has proven themselves over the past month. As with any item of recognition, Swimmer of the Month is a subjective exercise meant to highlight one athlete whose work holds noteworthy context – perhaps a swimmer who was visibly outperforming other swimmers over the month, or one whose accomplishments slipped through the cracks among other high-profile swims. If your favorite athlete wasn’t selected, feel free to respectfully recognize them in our comment section.

First off: the women’s NCAA Championships featured a number of mind-boggling performances – and most of those record-breaking swims have been covered in depth on our Women’s NCAA Championships channel. We’ve all read about Beata Nelson going 3-for-3 and winning the CSCAA Swimmer of the Year award. And let’s be honest: Nelson was the best swimmer at NCAAs. But in lieu of another story rehashing the same stats about Nelson, Abbey Weitzeil, Louise Hansson, Lilly King, Mallory Comerford or another record-breaker, we’re choosing to use our monthly awards series (Swimmer and Coach of the Month) to highlight some under-the-radar performances from the women’s NCAA meet.

With that out of the way, allow us to introduce Paige Madden.

Madden’s Virginia team was perhaps the biggest over-performers of the women’s NCAA meet. Psych sheet scoring had the Cavaliers 12th in swimming points with no likely dive scorers. We projected them 11th as a team in our Power Rankings. And we’ll be the first to admit that we undersold the Cavs. Hard. They went +41 in swimming points from their psych sheet projections – and a whopping 35 of those 41 points gained came from Madden herself.

Paige Madden: Improvement From NCAA Seeds

And those improvements came with big time drops – none more impressive than a nearly-six-second drop in her 500 free to move from the 16th seed to the national runner-up:

Paige Madden: Time Improvement Over Sophomore Season

Madden also took a big step forward from a key development perspective: after a freshman season in which she impressed at ACCs but gained significant time at NCAAs, Madden reversed the trend this year, going lifetime-bests at ACCs and then further improving those times at nationals:

2018 ACCs to NCAAs

Lifetime-bests noted in bold

2019 ACCs to NCAAs

Lifetime-bests noted in bold

We were even warned that this was coming: one of the more notable wins from our comment section predictors was that we were under-projecting Madden in our official picks. Were we ever. While last year’s data suggested an NCAA explosion was unlikely, Madden reversed the trend dramatically. With two more NCAA seasons remaining, Madden is one of many reasons for UVA fans to be very, very excited with the state of their program.

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