We are going to spend some time with my daughter making phone calls herself this afternoon. 
Just a warning and speaking from experienceâif your D is serious about art and animation and is in a good program she wonât have time to swim. Or sleep.
My daughter is currently going through the swim recruiting process but she is a senior going on last OV in March I will second the comment above that you will not hear much during conference championships, NCAA championships time, the teams are busy and donât ramp back up for recruiting til actually done for the season. Also you mention she is a junior, it is not too early to contact but no coaches could actually call my daughter until July 1st of junior year, before that it was all by email. But that is for D1, I am not sure if same for NAIA or D2 or D3. But when we were emailing for UV for spring break time really did not hear much until mid March of so, until most schools had finalized their senior recruits before spring signing which is April 12 this year for swim. As for how you determine best fit with a swim program, really it comes down to can you score potentially at conference championships in the top 8, that is who they are talking to emailing and recruiting first, if you are not at that level, the recruiting timeline is a little different. My daughter is more the B final level for the schools she took official visits to, so she is more the spring season, senior year recruit. I also second the prior comments that Josh Davis would be an assume college coach.
I am going to concur with another poster who suggested it might be the fact that you are contacting coaches that explains the lack of responses. Your reference to âlazyâ coaches, however tongue-in-cheek, might well be applied to lazy students as well from the coachâs perspective. For reference, my junior daughter has done 100% of her own questionnaire-filling, emailing and calling (she had to call a coach as a sophomore, and that was hard for her, but I was right there when she did it, and she did just fine). She maintains her own profile on collegeswimming.com and has ongoing email correspondence with several college coaches. As far as I can tell, every single coach to whom she has reached out has responded.
@leennp, I have to take exception to the âtarget schools where you will be in the top 8 at the schoolâs conference championshipâ. At least in the ACC, Big 10, Pac 12 and SEC thatâs not the case.
Hereâs an example: At the recently concluded ACC womens championship, 8th place in the 100 fly was a 52.54 (yes, thatâs crazy fast). 16th place was a 53.44.
At the 2016 Jr. Nationals, only one junior in the country had a time that would have been in the top 8 at ACCs: Eva Merrell, the top ranked swimmer in the nation. Only three others would have made the top 16: (Olivia Carter and Dakota Luther, tied for 8th in the country, and Jessica Nava, ranked 23rd).
That means that the 50 or so schools in those major conferences have to recruit far below those 4 juniors.
Our experience was that past yearsâ recruits offer the best guide to how attractive a swimmer will be to a program. And if you can make the top 24 in a conference final coming in, then you will be a strong candidate for schools other than the top 2 or 3 in the conference.
Well I am just giving feedback on how the recruiting process has been for my daughter, who no is not at the level of ACC, SEC, etc but more the mid major D1 level. She was told repeatedly by coaches in the summer/fall that they were looking for swimmers who could score at conference, even if their team only had 1 swimmer on the roster scoring top 8 for an event. Some schools even had minimum times you must have for walk on standards where no one on the current roster would even meet, never could figure that one out. And this is for a swimmer with great grades/test scores so academics was not the issue, with swim times at the futures level, not junior national level, so we did not look at top D1 programs, only mid major, D2 and D3. That does not mean that some of these schools did not continue contact into spring recruiting season, looking for continued time improvements, it was more of a comment that in the spring of junior year as the original poster is, you may not get a lot of contact from coaches if you are well outside of scoring level.
What everyone is saying is true. Coaches do not RECRUIT slower, that does not mean that they would not be happy with having a nice, hard working swimmer on their roster but they definitely will not spend much time recruiting that swimmer. Your daughter needs to find a team that matches her swim ability. You mentioned SCAD, along with your daughters 100/200 breast times. Scad is way to fast for her. La Grange is much slower so her times would fit in. I know nothing about any of these art schools so I am specifically talking about swim.
Spend more time researching the swim times of the schools she is interested in. This will safe you guys much time and angst. good luck
When you are looking at the current swimmersâ times on collegeswimming, be sure you look at their best times for the season, not their untapered mid-season times. The âwhere do I fitâ feature has been very helpful for my daughter, and she has targeted schools that show where she could score at conference with her current best times. That may explain why she is getting good response rates. If your daughter is relatively new to year-around swimming and may have a lot more in her, so to speak, she should also mention that in her emails. I know at least one coach who has taken that into consideration with a recruit.
RIT in upstate NewYork (yes I know not south) has a animation major sophomore breast stroker on their swim team. We went to RIT for a swim championship several years ago and everyone was super nice - the karma was great! The other sports teams helped in the setup and running of the meet - I thought that showed good school spirit. It will be very cold up there but RIT is an excellent school for animation. Looks like both can be done there. Take a look at the rosters of the schools you are interested in - many list the majors.