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Date: May 22, 2000
To: Connecticut Swimming House of Delegates & CSI Coach Members
From: George Miles, Chair of Technical Planning
Re: Analysis of CSI Senior Swimming "Top 40"
To prepare our delegation for the spring Eastern Zone meeting’s discussion of USS Sectional Championships, I conducted an analysis of Connecticut swimmer’s times against various cut-off times that had been proposed for the new meets. Nan Cooper used the CSI database (which uses Jim Cooper’s DBSwim to maintain a master file of results from CSI and selected other meets) to identify the fastest 40 women and fastest 40 men in every short course senior event. We extracted complete time files for every ranked swimmer (including their best times in events in which they were not in the top 40 as well as those in which they were). I then entered that "team" file against the following short course time standards:
2000 Senior Nationals
2000 Junior Championships
2000 15/16 94th percentile (Quadrennial standards)
1999 15/16 AAA time (Top 16 based standards)
2000 15/16 90th percentile (Quadrennial standards)
2000 Region I time standards.
I then calculated the number of swimmers from Connecticut who made each event at each standard and the number of Connecticut swimmers who made different numbers of events at each standard. The attached sheets summarize that information. Note that the sheet reporting number of athletes achieving a standard first reports the numbers by discrete category, that is the number who made ONLY 1 event, the number who made ONLY 2 events, etc., and then shows the total number who made AT LEAST 1 event, AT LEAST 2 events, etc.
As the CSI database includes most major senior meets in which CSI athletes competed this past year (including USA Swimming Junior Champs, YMCA Nats, CIAC Boys Open Champs as well as the Squid Invitational, the Burgdorf Invitational at Rutgers, and the Pioneer Valley meet in Springfield but NOT the Girls CIAC Open Champs), it seems that the report gives us a good idea how many of our swimmers would qualify in how many events for Sectionals based on whatever time standards are finally adopted next month.
In addition, I think the numbers, as exemplified in the attached graphs, confirm what many coaches have been saying in private for several years – that our athletes are not performing nearly as well in distance events (free and off stroke) as they ought to be based on their performances in shorter distances. The percentile based cuts reveal this most starkly. These cuts are based on careful statistical analysis of tens of thousands of swims across the U.S. and unlike the Top 16 based times are a truly "standardized" system in which the same percentage of swimmers have achieved the various reported levels. In the longer freestyle events as well as in the 200 off strokes and the 400 IM, CSI has far fewer swimmers achieving the 90th or the 94th standard respectively than it does for the sprint events. Over the next several months, technical planning intends to address this issue. I encourage all member coaches and teams to consider why we are, quite literally, behind ourselves in these events and what we can do about it. One of the major challenges will be to find ways to encourage teams to conduct distance meets in which they receive less for "splash" fees than they would if they run shorter events. Another issue will be motivating swimmers to train and compete at these longer distances. Please share your ideas with me and with each other.
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