We live in indoor pool land but I am very grateful for the official in the family.
All vacations (and college visits) are planned around swimming. These days, even during team breaks we seem to make decisions based on pool availability.
Juggling the need to drop time with the need to visit colleges is extremely hard. Nivo prioritized correctly IMO, but there is no win-win here.
@Nivo has your daughter explored the club swimming situation at the schools she likes? It might be something to explore when finalizing her school list.
Not to mention LCM is a very short season. Littles and 13-14 boys cut time -.that is typically about it.
We had our first LC practice the last week of June. Leaving in a week for Futures. I have extreme 50m pool envy. 
We know quite a few kids who were extremely academic focus and hoped to leverage swimming into opportunities at reach schools, so I’m really not sure why there’s the continue mantra to the OP expand the list. They know the risk, not every kid prioritizes swimming (said as a parent of a kid who prioritized swimming). We also knew some incredible students who jumped for joy at being recruited at schools with 90% acceptance rates where they could have attended with absolutely no help from a coach. Every student’s journey is different. I said a few hundred posts ago that I thought the athlete was going to suffer from only having LCM times and being on the bubble and that’s probably still true.
I actually think seeing the schools was incredibly important for this student who is considering EDing from another country, so have no criticism about prioritizing that over yet another LCM time. I really doubt that was going to move the needle. Although for the record, I’ve seen tons of kids drop times well beyond puberty, maybe more boys than girls, but it really depends on the kid and training thus far.
Good luck OP, a good friend’s daughter had to suffer through a ton of musical chairs in fall of senior year as she was an excellent prospect (for the record she was targeting ivys), but did not make initial lists. It’s a small swim world, so swimmers do spend some time weighing their options into September and when they make a decision, coaches scramble to finalize their list. She ended up in a very great fit, but it was definitely stressful.
I just don’t think it’s something that can’t be counted on. It’s a time when plateaus are common, even with top swimmers. The step up of college training is often good for these swimmers, many of whom don’t follow a regimented lift program.
I’ve been following along and have probably read at least 75% of the 1486 posts so far. For most, hindsight is 20/20. But in making decisions, one has to go on the information available at the time, along with what one values, and dealing with other constraints (such as time and money). People make the best decisions they can at the time, and then need to move forward. If they wish they had listened to advice X more or ignored advice Y more, then it happens, but there’s nothing that can be done about it after the fact.
Although there are people who may read this thread in the future for advice, that is not the purpose of this thread. The purpose is to help OP and OP’s daughter by answering questions and providing actionable feedback that aligns with their requests. If people want to start a different thread to discuss the intricacies of swimming recruiting and who should do what and in what circumstances, that’s fine, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to continue doing that on OP’s thread, when it’s not in response to one of their questions or is not an actionable item (i.e. water under the bridge), particularly since this thread already contains so many warnings and I-told-you-sos, so the points have already been made for posterity.
@NiVo, wishing your daughter the best as she navigates the college search process.
I agree that at this point it doesn’t really make sense to “expand the list”. But, I think there probably are/were selective schools (sub 20% admit rate) that had weak swim teams, and not focusing on those schools is what was puzzling. But, as I said about 200 posts ago, at this point, whatever will happen, will happen.
I looked up club swimming at McGill and it’s available. Looking at the 2023 league championship times for the McGill varsity team, I am not sure that it will be a certainty that OPs daughter will get a chance to swim there.
Club swimming would be the perfect opportunity for her to go to a school she loves and continue swimming!
Oh I’m not suggesting you can count on dropping time which coaches are well aware. We’ve seen more than a few absolute age group super stars that peaked at 12, and some slow boilers that really shined in high school and are currently killing it at college. It’s also why I think the visits were actually more important. Based on reading the 1000+ posts, this is a swimmer on the bubble and a good meeting and rapport may make the difference if a few of the top prospects jump to other schools and they’re trying to fill out their list. My son seriously considered a school way faster than you’d think would be interested based on times, but I think the coach liked him and thought he would continue to drop time (also probably helped to be a male sprinter who wasn’t done filling out).
Again, to be fair, the title of this thread is Swimming Recruiting for Int’l Jr. Targeting Highly Selective Colleges, so the advice here should be/is about recruiting as a path to college admissions.
The OP has started 2-3 other “chance me” type threads (concurrent with this one) on CC which do not have a recruiting focus. These other threads all have far less responses than this one and the responses all reflect the uncertainty of unhooked admissions to the schools they are targeting.
If the point of this thread is recruiting, I feel the OP now should have a pretty good feel on where his daughter stands vis a vis the programs he has targeted.
If the goal continues to be athletic recruitment, he probably needs to reassess, or expand the list.
The Alto Swim Club website lists options for their “Senior 1” group in lieu of the Sectionals this weekend and the ISCA Championship in St. Pete FL in two weeks: the Alto Summer Swelter 7/15-16, the Alto Last Splash Invitational 7/22-23, and the Far Western Championship 7/27-30. (Higher-level swimmers in the club (Senior 2 and 3) are targeting the Summer Junior Nationals at the start of August).
Actionable advice: skip the FL trip and swim one of those latter two meets in CA. And if substantial time improvements are needed to get traction with the remaining several programs in category 2 as earlier stated, realize that is very unlikely at this point with the choice to prioritize school visits instead of training, and visit the 1-2 schools in category 1 that are interested.
Walk-on possibilities for varsity swimming appear to be minimal to none at the targeted list of schools that would be applied to if not recruited. If varsity swimming rather than club swimming is still the goal (and the topic of this thread), I don’t see many options left without expanding the list.
I say stick with the plan to swim in Florida. Let the kid swim as it is what she likes to do. Never know if a coach might see her there and be interested or you meet a parent with a good tip or she falls in love with Florida (very unlikely in the summer heat) and wants to look at some schools there.
I don’t think the recruiting picture is going to change in the next few weeks. A coach will find her a good fit for the team with her times from April or May and maybe like that she’s shown a lot of interest in US schools and continued to train this summer or the coach will find another recruit who has better times.
Just let her swim where she wants to swim this summer.
I think you misunderstood. No one said she should not swim. On the contrary. She has minimal cuts for the meet in FL. What some were suggesting (my self included) was to choose a meet where she can swim more events and make finals. It’s advice I would give any swimmer. The highest level meet is not always the best meet. Think of a tournament you will get eliminated in the first round vs another one where you may get to quarter finals or above.
But the family made their plans and I don’t see where changing them now will help. The D may have told coaches she was swimming in Florida, they may have made plans to see her there (0r by video, or check the times). I think it would be more disruptive to keep changing plans.
The family has a lot of options. At this point I think they should just let it play out, consider the options when any offers come in, apply to the schools she’s picked out.
I hope D24 is having a good experience being in the US, training with a competitive club, getting to know American high school and college students. Hopefully this will be informative especially if it comes down to deciding between school in US vs Canada.
Not swimming PBs is part of every swimmer’s journey. D24 swims with the spirit of team. once she joins a team section with which she trains and competes, it is not in her character to quit that section and wander her own way with another section/coach. for her, that fully is part of what commitment means. She’s also training with teammates who are currently swimming in a few of her target schools and could become her teammates. .
The NESCAC pre-read dates are here, and she expects to have a much clearer idea within the coming weeks… which pre-reads, which are passed, where she ranks, and ultimately what her odds are.
Have recently discussed with parents involved with similar schools but in other sports (Rowing @Columbia, Wrestling @JHU)For borderline athletes, they pointed to decisions being made as late September/Early October…wondering if that is typical in general, and swimming in particular?
I think this happens along with musical chairs. One swimmer/athlete changes plans and there can be a whole domino effect. It is natural that as time goes on coaches move further down the list. Lower ranked schools also wait to see which athletes may slip through the cracks.
Not sure this is helpful but wanted to at least throw it out there. We had a female family member at Ohio U, and male close friend at Pitt, both recruited swimmers. Both stopped swimming after freshman year. This isn’t to say this could/would happen to your daughter, but make sure that fit outside of swimming is great too.
Club swimming can also be a great route. Lots of fun, less pressure and big fish in a little pond.
D24 had been swimming pretty much all her life, and she cherishes both the training, the competition, and being part of a team. D3 runs on a lighter schedule than D1, and most of the coaches she’s met reiterated their support for academics first. It’s hard to tell ahead of time how swimming will fit with college, but her attitude is to basically try to be a recruited/walk-on member of a team, and if she really doesn’t enjoy it, she will then consider club swimming.
The college tour re-rated that view, to the extent that her list 2 lists of schools obviously aren’t an exact match, so she feels like she’s done what she could to get recruited, and she’ll find out soon whether she is or isn’t, and whether she is an athlete recruit, or a regular college applicant.