SRS Season Totals - Women

Kaley McIntyre’s outlier season, median SRS and the meaningless down-side of range, and 'No one ever sees you coming, do they NESCAC?'

You know the drill. For an explanation of SRS, go here. If you want to see the top 50 table of season-total SRS for athletes in Women’s events, go to the footnote.¹

Women

Let’s do this one a little differently.

Our skepticism about the value of outliers started with the recognition that all records are outliers but not all records lay as far out as others.² Thus using outliers to measure other swims introduces unnecessary distortions. The obvious way around this problem was to do a little extra work and instead measure swims against a large set of fast swims - specific to each NCAA division - stretching over multiple seasons (the core concept behind SRS). We spent so much time dunking on outliers we might have given the impression that we are not interested in them. But there are some outliers that we care about a lot.

Kaley McIntyre’s outlier season

Kaley McIntyre’s season gives us a chance to graphically illustrate what an outlier looks like.

We made a report. Have at it (click this link, let us know if it gives you any trouble). It compares athletes, swimming in Women’s events in the 2023-24 season, on two metrics - season-total SRS, and median SRS per swim. The first is a measure of total fast swimming this season, the second a measure of consistency in swimming fast. We put in some reference lines for the 95th percentile in both metrics.

You see that lone blue dot in the upper right-hand corner…?

As you can see median SRS is on the horizontal axis and SRS season-total is on the vertical axis.

How many of you had this figured out already? Yeh, no surprise. You’re a bunch of smart cookies. Can’t get anything past you.

As you can see, Ms. McIntyre is joined by only four other athletes in the 95th percentile segment.

Two things to note about that. First, the other four athletes are all-stars who had ultra-elite seasons.

Second, the other four athletes, though closer than anyone else in Division III, weren’t really that close to equaling Ms. McIntyre’s season. They were all brilliant, but that’s the point. Ms. Verkleeren, Ms. Augustyn, Ms. Turvey and Ms. Fadely had epic seasons that define excellence in Division III swimming. And still, Ms. McIntyre’s season is an outlier compared to these other historically fantastic seasons.

In terms of SRS, Sophia Verkleeren and Kate Augustyn, basically tied. It’s unusual that scores so high would be so close. They also overlapped on their main events and basically Sammy Sosa -Mark McGwire’d this thing for the latter half of the season.³ Two of the absolute best, both coming back for another season in 2024-25.

Alex Turvey ends her career (we think?) as one of the great sprinters of this generation. The British Columbia native almost certainly has a year of eligibility left. We don’t want her to leave the party (she got so much better every year) but we think maybe this season was it. We’ll keep our eyes open for any indication she will swim D3 next season. We think she was a biology major. Maybe she’ll go to med school and swim for NYU.⁴

Jennah Fadely gets into this quadrant through a different path than the others. Ms. Fadely’s season-total SRS numbers are measurably lower than the others - the after effects of an early season injury - but her per swim SRS score is next level.⁵ One upside of that setback was that Ms. Fadely spent more time working on her 200 IM. The winner of the consolation final in 200 IM at last season’s nationals, this season Ms. Fadely came in third behind only Sophia Verkleeren and Hope’s amazing Greta Gidley.

In the upper segment of the season-total SRS, but a little more to the left on the median SRS, we find:

Ella Roberson is of course the First-Year sensation who swam impressive sprints all season. Her lower median SRS is probably due to her being a good sport and trying some distance events like 500 Free and 1000 Free. In which she swam great but, understandably, not at the elite level with which she swam her core events (50 Free, 100 Free, 200 Free). With the median SRS it is kind of a ‘who cares’ because it isn’t pointing to a deficit or weakness. It is more a function of willingness to try other stuff. Which is probably a strength.

Bengisu Caymaz was a little up and down in her main events, though she was ready to romp once conference championships came around. She is a First-Year - which suggests we should expect an adjustment period - and she did move to Gambier from Istanbul - which suggests…god knows what - and after the winter break she was one of the 2-3 most valuable swimmers on Kenyon’s national championship team. Again we don’t see a meaningful pattern in the lower median SRS.

Emily Harris was just really really good all season long for Denison. Probably most dominant in events of 200 yards (she won both 200 Free and 200 Fly at NCACs), she did whatever was asked of her. Anchoring the medley relays and the 400 and 800 free relays and swimming the 500 Free. Which makes her a very valuable team-contributor and probably dinged her median SRS a little.

Gabby Wei won the 200 Breast at Nationals, which felt like it sealed Kenyon’s team national championship.

Ms. Wei was a gamer all season, regularly swimming 100 Breast, 200 Breast, 200 IM and 400 IM. Range hurts median SRS, though it helps pretty much everything else.

NESCAC

Almost done here. Just want to point out something about the NESCAC.

What we see is a large number of excellent NESCAC swimmers with very healthy median SRS scores but surprisingly low season-total SRS numbers. We are convinced it is a function of conference rules, which prevent these teams from serious training and competition early in the Fall. These swimmers play catch-up all season, and then hit peaks just about the time nationals starts. There’s nothing to really complain about here. In fact, we find entertaining the uncertainty this infuses into NCAAs. So often with NESCAC swimmers, you never see them coming.

1

2. The classic example is that SwimCloud Points uses NCAA event records (generally set by Olympians swimming with their college teams between Olympics) as the basis for rating all other college swims. To use the most accessible example of how that might create distortions: Women who swim distance events will have their swims measured against Katie Ledecky, while Men who swim IM will not have their swims measured against Michael Phelps (because he did not go to/swim in college).

3. /sigh. Just go look it up.

4. jk Ed Maas, teasing is our socially awkward way of being friendly.

5. Apparently knee injuries are extremely unpleasant when trying to swim breaststroke.