D3SO Eagle of the Week: McKee Thorsen
We are believers.
We hesitated to give this award to Emory First-Year McKee Thorsen. He definitely earned it but…
Hesitation is a strange emotion. It is transient and foggy by definition. We are not here to defend the feeling of hesitation on rational grounds. We just couldn't get over the idea, somewhere in the back of our minds, that we were being punked.
We are familiar with Crow Thorsen. He has been both a guest researcher on this blog, and our first ever Eagle of the Week. Could Crow Thorsen really have a younger brother who just shows up at Emory and takes over the division lead in 200 Fly for five weeks? How many examples can you think of where siblings are both, say, top 50 swimmers in Division III, on the same team, at the same time? We hesitated to believe...any of it.1
Anyway our anxieties were relieved at the Emory Invitational when McKee Thorsen swam a team-leading 200 IM in 1:50.03. Because…so did his brother, Crow Thorsen.
So if this were an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Crow Thorsen, he would never make it so obvious, right? He wouldn’t have them tie.2 By the impeccable logic of this reasoning, we were convinced that McKee Thorsen is in fact a person who exists, and who swims for Emory. So let's go with that.
200 Fly
Moving through the leaderboard, the top time by JHU’s Alex Ren is a SwimCloud hallucination (we discussed that last week). Mr. Ren is a fantastic athlete, but that time comes from a breakdown somewhere between the timing hardware and software.
John Drumm of Case Western actually owns the top time (1:47.11)3, with CMU grad Aleksander Tarczynski4 just behind him, followed by last year's 100 Fly National Champion Marko Krtinic from Kenyon. Those would be your fully-tapered full-effort times from older swimmers who are now going to take the next two months off to reset.
Frank Applebaum is next on the list and he posted what is - for him - an early season warm-up time of 1:47.82. At Nationals two years ago he went 1:44.01. Last year at Nationals he went 1:43.96. He's just pacing himself.
Then you have two very similar times. One from McKee Thorsen and one - about 0.20 faster - from Cooper Costello.
Cooper Costello, from Chicago, is another high-upside First-Year. Mr. Costello was ranked in the top 500 coming out of high school (and top 50 in California), and most athletes with that ranking swim in power Division I programs. But Cooper Costello got into the University of Chicago.5
Anyway, early this season McKee Thorsen led the division for a long-time in 200 Fly, a mind-numbingly punishing event. And we think that might happen again a few more times in his career.
200 IM
Yeh, hilariously, McKee Thorsen is tied with his older brother Crow for the team lead in 200 IM. Their 1:50.03 is good enough for fifth in the division in this now highly contested event.
Derek Maas, a long-time dominant swimmer in the SEC who got into NYU medical school and is using his COVID fifth year to swim D3, laid-down a shockingly fast time in 200 IM in Chicago this weekend.
Larry Yu from Pomona-Pitzer was brilliant last year and is still brilliant this year. He is in second place on the leaderboard.
Noah Hargrove from Kenyon punched his way to third place on this list over the weekend and honestly looked like he had something left in the tank when he exited the pool.
Garrett Clasen won this event at Nationals last year. And he doesn't usually get going until later in the season, so it is remarkable that he is already in fourth place.
Then we get to the Thorsens. They are operating in the deepest end of the pool in this event, together holding on to fifth place.
You know what jumps out at us in this event? None of the guys mentioned so far are First-Years. Except McKee Thorsen. The other guys (besides Crow) are all grad students and Seniors. Mr. Clasen won 200 IM at Nationals twice in a row. Yet, McKee Thorsen is in that group, in his first year in the division.
100 Fly
McKee Thorsen is also tied for fifth place in this event. Care to guess who he is tied with? Yes, Cooper Costello. Thanks for paying attention. They share a 48.69 in 100 Fly.
McKee Thorsen is likely to have a long First-Year season, with multiple responsibilities at Nationals. He shows as much promise and versatility as any First-Year in the division. We are 95% confident that he exists.
So McKee Thorsen, you are D3SO's Eagle of the Week.
If you were one of his teammates who earlier in the year texted us to confirm that McKee Thorsen exists, let me assure you that this only heightened our paranoia.
We don’t have a data set capable of researching this but if we had to hypothesize how many times two brothers posted the exact same time in an event and that time lingered in the division’s top five for the first two months of the season, our null hypothesis would be that this has happened zero times in the history of Division III swimming.
This is an improvement over the school record in 200 Fly, which is 1:49.36 and also held by John Drumm. Mr. Drumm is also a graduate of Bronx Science. Case Western gets a solid class of student athletes.
What is going on with the UAA? Case Western looks stronger than ever. Carnegie Mellon is a top ten team. Chicago took Emory down to the final couple of events at the last UAA championship. And NYU might be the strongest team outside of the big three since D3 swimming resumed post-COVID.
Division III swimming punches above its weight class because swimmers who could swim D1 but who get into Chicago, or Hopkins, or MIT (or big-three schools that offer uniquely attractive academic and athletic training environments) may have reason to believe that D1 powerhouses can't compete with these D3 schools in either the collegiate quality of life or educational and career opportunities.