Denison Invite Psych Sheet: An annotated guide
This post is a disaster.
Denison Invitational
Festivities start Wednesday evening with a bunch of LCM events, no doubt for swimmers looking to hit some U.S. Olympic Qualifying standards.
For us, the action starts at prelims on Thursday morning. We don’t know if they will stick with the order on the psych sheet or move the relays around. But we are going to annotate in the order of events presented to us.
The competition is filled out with a Division I Mid-Major (Eastern Michigan) and two Division II teams (Indianapolis and Emory & Henry). Indianapolis is fast, so this could get interesting.1 And you are already familiar with Emory, WashU and our hosts, Denison University, in quaint Granville, OH.
Pro tip: try to get a table at Three Tigers, you won’t regret it. And if you are into cider, Seek No Further Cidery is worth the walk down the block (and across the street, then through the alley...but it’s worth it). 
First up, Women’s 200 Free Relay.
So, you see anything odd in that first event? That Emory A Relay time of 1:30.44 is really fast - it is 0.05 off the Division III record.2
That is not their seed time. Not sure why that is there. We would peg the actual Emory A Relay seed time at 1:34.99, a mark upon which they are likely to improve here.
OK, that Eastern Michigan time checks out, and so does the Indianapolis seed time. Then we get Emory’s B Relay seed time, which looks right. The Indianapolis B Relay time checks out too.
That Emory & Henry time is from February 2016…that’s OK we are just going to keep going.
Denison’s time is from the Akron Zips meet at the beginning of this season (novel). Given Denison’s reputation for linear improvement through the course of the season, we expect them to blow through that time. WashU’s time is from the Chicago D3 Shootout (‘Glorifying senseless gun-violence since 2021’) which is just more than three weeks ago. We think that relay will drop a little time here.
We aren’t going to go through every team in every event (and literally fact-check every seed time…). We are just going to hit some highlights.
Emory’s seed time in this event is from 2018 Nationals.
Oliver Smith swam the anchor leg on that 2018 Nationals relay. Since then Mr. Smith has had two careers after swimming, first as a clinical research coordinator at Emory, and then in real estate. Want to buy some property in Atlanta? Call Oliver Smith. But he won’t be swimming the anchor leg of this relay.
Emory will be looking to improve on their 1:22.66 from the first weekend of November. Seed times for WashU and Denison appear to be accurate.
Penelope Helm has become a favorite of this blog. That 4:55.49 is not her seed time, of course.3 But we aren’t going to hold that against her. Since Penelope Helm is awesome her actual seed time (4:56.51) is good enough to still lead this field.
About Denison, last season Emily Harris reached a 4:55.67 at Nationals, Quinn Brown sat 4:55-mid all season (and went 4:53.92 at this meet last year), Tara Witkowski touched 4:50-mid at Nationals, and Taryn Wisner has gone under 4:50 three times in the previous two seasons. Those seem like relevant data points.
Speaking of blog favorites, Crow Thorsen leads the D3 pack with a seed time drawn from UAAs last February. Logan D’Amore and Adam Copses have seed times from that classic 2022 Nationals. Man, that was a fun meet. Isn’t it great how these seed times trigger waves of nostalgia?
Good times.
Ryan Gibbons changes it up with a seed time drawn from this meet last year (4:31.51).
Joao D'Elia Lapagesse Nas, being a First-year, really boxed-in the meet organizers, forcing them to go with a time from this season, a rather impressive 4:35.49.4
Ryan Hillery of WashU just doesn’t seem to get what it is we are doing here. His 4:36.35 is from this year (booo!). Last year, at this meet, he went 4:31.40, so he’s a dangerous competitor.
We think Denison’s Lucas Conrads and Tyler Distenfeld both have a solid shot to go under 4:30 at this meet.
And we are two events in and we are exhausted.
This was a bad idea. We will check back in later. Good luck everyone.
Division II University of Indianapolis is ranked #1 in the CSCAA Men’s poll and #3 in the Women’s poll, but SwimCloud’s quantitative ranking is less impressed with their performance this year, ranking the Men 8th and Women 7th in a championship format meet (which this is). Emory & Henry is a Division II program in a small Virginia school on the border with Tennessee, and their swim program has had less D2 success than Indianapolis.
And it is strangely familiar, because it is the exact time that Emory posted on March 17, 2022 when they were barely touched out by Kenyon’s Relay at 2022 Nationals. That relay team had Caroline Maki and Taylor Leone on it, as well as Cailen Chinn and Zoe Walker. None of those athletes are currently on Emory, and no Emory 200 Free Relay team has gone that fast since.
That 4:55.49 is what she swam at Nationals on March 16, 2022.
We appreciate the restraint they showed not reaching back to that seductive 4:29.23 he posted at the Florida High School Athletic Association 4A State Championship in November of last year.
Maybe the Emory coaches read this article. Or they corrected an error, not sure. But all of the entry times (per MeetMobile) are now corrected to current season bests.
Sorry that exhausted you because it was an interesting read. But it must have taken forever to research. So thanks. And I guess I’ve come to believe that the entry times in these invitationals just don’t matter. Denison and Emory won’t even swim their top 4 in prelims relays. Nothing counts until finals (except a DQ. Which would be Not Good.)