What cuts does my high school kid need to make for colleges? D1, D2, etc. My kid threw me for a loop when they said they wanted to swim in college. |
That's not enough information. Boy or girl? Does your kid swim club? What grade is your kid in? |
It seems so variable. I thought futures cuts at a minimum were required for D1, but a senior from my kids’ club just committed to a D1 and I believe she has sectional times but no futures.
How do you feel about your swimmer wanting to swim in college? I’m hoping mine don’t want to. They are still middle school age. |
You can get a decent idea of where your kid needs to be by looking at where recruits of various levels end up. https://www.swimcloud.com/recruiting/rankings/?page=1 |
It is much harder for boys- especially in D1. My college swimmer D3 (junior NESAC) had several NCSA cuts and 2 futures cuts high school. The D1 schools that were interested in him were not academic matches. |
DS was a recruited D1 swimmer. Good metric is whether they can place in finals at the conference meet. Look up desired schools and look at their conference championships. They expect freshmen to be able to make B (or maybe C) finals in their best events. Obviously different conferences are very different. There is a huge difference between SEC/Big10/ACC conference times and American East or Patriot League but they're all D1. Several D2 schools are faster than lower ranked D1 schools and some D3 are also very fast but don't give any athletic scholarship money.
On swimcloud look up schools they're interested in attending and look at their recruits and compare times. |
It can also depend on whether you are a 17 y.o. or 19 y.o. as a high school senior. |
Which is better? A 17 y.o. would mean more improvement likely, right? |
Go to swimcloud. Look at current and past few recruiting classes for the schools you are interested in. Having just gone through the process, it really is that simple. |
This does not matter at all (although I don’t know any 19 year old seniors - that would be weird). |
Parent of multiple college swimmers, age when entering college does not matter. |
Why is it harder for boys? Are there fewer slots or something? |
There are less D1 swim teams for males and less scholarships. |
It's more than this. There are also more boys who want to continue swimming in college for various reasons. Boys tend to get better in high school and want to keep the momentum going. Girl swimmers often peak early and struggle in last last few years of high school to drop time. That means that girls are often done with swimming and lose interest in continuing in college. Plus, even at the schools with men's swim teams, there are often fewer roster spots because of Title IX (i.e., the huge # of roster spots on the football team means that other male sports have to limit their roster spots so that they are roughly equivalent w/ the number of female roster spots). This is not just true for D1 as PP suggested, it's true across the board. Very good male swimmers may not even be able to walk onto a swim team in college. It's a totally different situation for girls. |
No. |