NCAP going downhill?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Only the VA sites at NCap do well anymore- a few strong men at Prep and that’s it for the MD side of things

Are you serious?

So many sites that it is hard to generalize. AU + Holton is a strong site. North is good but just a small scale club. Prep is really struggling. Definitely on the downward trend now. They haven’t had any homeschoolers move to the area for them in quite a while.

How are you backing this claim up?

Look at prep 2012 to 2020, and then look at the results since. As weak as they been under Bruce.

They currently have a really deep group of fast 11-14 year olds, as well as swimmers on the younger end of the 15-18 year old group that are outstanding.

[Anonymous]

Prep silver super strong

Prep gold- womp womp

But better than AU!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Prep silver super strong

Prep gold- womp womp

But better than AU!

Prep Gold currently has some excellent 15 year olds, they will be a force in the next few years.

[Anonymous]

I don't know, Prep Silver is super strong, I agree, but Prep Gold has some young guns that are not even high school juniors yet. Both male and female, but if you check the PVS top times list that ended this past August, the top-5 spots from the 50 free all the way up to the 1650 are loaded with boys from NCAP Prep. Will be interesting to see how they develop these next few years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Only the VA sites at NCap do well anymore- a few strong men at Prep and that’s it for the MD side of things

Are you serious?

So many sites that it is hard to generalize. AU + Holton is a strong site. North is good but just a small scale club. Prep is really struggling. Definitely on the downward trend now. They haven’t had any homeschoolers move to the area for them in quite a while.

How are you backing this claim up?

Look at prep 2012 to 2020, and then look at the results since. As weak as they been under Bruce.

You mean the period when Katie Ledecky, a multi-generational talent and arguably one of the greatest female swimmers of all time was contributing to stats for the Prep site? You mean nobody since 2020 has seemed to quite match up to that? Yes ... that is surprising. Or did you mean that during the peak pandemic/pools closed time-frame from 2020-2021 no local kids were crushing it in the water they could not train in?

I don't really have a dog in the fight, but love to follow the sport, including here locally, and for sure two Prep kids who graduated in 2022 swam at Olympic Trials last year and one made the team.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you seem to be the same person that wanders every NCAP message thread with an axe to grind about Prep. Not sure your story, maybe things just did not work out for your kid at some point, or you used to work there years ago, etc. but the families we know with kids who swim for NCAP Prep all seem very happy with it and are not comparing their kid on a daily basis to a 10-time Olympic Gold Medalist.

*2023 grads
What those of us in the swim community know is what the rest of the Prep Gold 1 group looked like at this time. That's what you see coming up in several threads.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Only the VA sites at NCap do well anymore- a few strong men at Prep and that’s it for the MD side of things

Are you serious?

So many sites that it is hard to generalize. AU + Holton is a strong site. North is good but just a small scale club. Prep is really struggling. Definitely on the downward trend now. They haven’t had any homeschoolers move to the area for them in quite a while.

How are you backing this claim up?

Look at prep 2012 to 2020, and then look at the results since. As weak as they been under Bruce.

You mean the period when Katie Ledecky, a multi-generational talent and arguably one of the greatest female swimmers of all time was contributing to stats for the Prep site? You mean nobody since 2020 has seemed to quite match up to that? Yes ... that is surprising. Or did you mean that during the peak pandemic/pools closed time-frame from 2020-2021 no local kids were crushing it in the water they could not train in?

I don't really have a dog in the fight, but love to follow the sport, including here locally, and for sure two Prep kids who graduated in 2022 swam at Olympic Trials last year and one made the team.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you seem to be the same person that wanders every NCAP message thread with an axe to grind about Prep. Not sure your story, maybe things just did not work out for your kid at some point, or you used to work there years ago, etc. but the families we know with kids who swim for NCAP Prep all seem very happy with it and are not comparing their kid on a daily basis to a 10-time Olympic Gold Medalist.

*2023 grads
What those of us in the swim community know is what the rest of the Prep Gold 1 group looked like at this time. That's what you see coming up in several threads.

And those of us in the swim community also know what the group looks like currently. But we also know you will continue to grind the axe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Only the VA sites at NCap do well anymore- a few strong men at Prep and that’s it for the MD side of things

Are you serious?

So many sites that it is hard to generalize. AU + Holton is a strong site. North is good but just a small scale club. Prep is really struggling. Definitely on the downward trend now. They haven’t had any homeschoolers move to the area for them in quite a while.

How are you backing this claim up?

Look at prep 2012 to 2020, and then look at the results since. As weak as they been under Bruce.

You mean the period when Katie Ledecky, a multi-generational talent and arguably one of the greatest female swimmers of all time was contributing to stats for the Prep site? You mean nobody since 2020 has seemed to quite match up to that? Yes ... that is surprising. Or did you mean that during the peak pandemic/pools closed time-frame from 2020-2021 no local kids were crushing it in the water they could not train in?

I don't really have a dog in the fight, but love to follow the sport, including here locally, and for sure two Prep kids who graduated in 2022 swam at Olympic Trials last year and one made the team.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you seem to be the same person that wanders every NCAP message thread with an axe to grind about Prep. Not sure your story, maybe things just did not work out for your kid at some point, or you used to work there years ago, etc. but the families we know with kids who swim for NCAP Prep all seem very happy with it and are not comparing their kid on a daily basis to a 10-time Olympic Gold Medalist.

*2023 grads
What those of us in the swim community know is what the rest of the Prep Gold 1 group looked like at this time. That's what you see coming up in several threads.

And those of us in the swim community also know what the group looks like currently. But we also know you will continue to grind the axe.

Oh, okay, I get it now ... you sound like someone who used to be part of the Prep Gold group over the last few years and decided to leave maybe ... I'm sure you had your own personal reasons if that's the case. That's big-time swimming up there, and surprise, surprise, the parents and the kids are super intense about it as are the coaches. I don't mean at NCAP even, I mean on any team around here if you get to the top training group.

To the last commenters point though, your experience does not seem to reflect the current status of that group in any way. It's clearly full of swimmers and thriving all around. Not taking away from or delegitimizing your own personal experience, but it sounds like your swimmer is not even in the group any more or is off at college. Your complaints don't resonate for many of us because they are dated a bit and just do not reflect the here and now.

[Anonymous]

Go grind your butter knife somewhere else

[Anonymous]

Who has the spreadsheet on the churn rate at NCAP sites/groups? Prep Gold 1 has to be in the 5Y lead. Brucelickers will definitely try to spin it as natural selection/kids who just couldn’t cut it at the hands of the master. That’s a terrible take.

[Anonymous]

Someone keeps a spreadsheet of kids leaving swim programs? That is, uh, COMPLETELY INSANE. Get a life or go touch grass or whatever you need to do to get it together.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Who has the spreadsheet on the churn rate at NCAP sites/groups? Prep Gold 1 has to be in the 5Y lead. Brucelickers will definitely try to spin it as natural selection/kids who just couldn’t cut it at the hands of the master. That’s a terrible take.

Wow. This sounds so incredibly personal for you. It just leads to the overwhelming feeling that you yourself had a swimmer at Prep who left on very bad terms. Not saying who was at fault, but based on how you worded this, you seem to have so much venom that you can't let go of.

Not sure how it ended up for you, but no one is forcing anyone to stay anywhere they don't want to be. Kids move, switch teams, find better fits for themselves, etc. in every sport imaginable. Some disgruntled athletes (and often parents, who are we kidding here) just sit with their coach and work it through, explain their concerns honestly, and come to an approach that can work for them and they stay with the air cleared.

Previous posters in this thread who seem to have first-hand knowledge of Prep as it stands now all seem to report the Gold group environment as being very much the opposite of what your experience was I'm guessing 2-3 years back. Granted, it was still a bit Covid restricted then, one of the best swimmers was the coach's daughter (which probably rankled some feathers for reasons we can all imagine having been around youth sports here in the DC area, unfortunately) and so on, which may have contributed to how you felt about your experience.

I'll just say I'm sure you're leading with the heart, and we all see red when it comes to our kids, but it's hard to believe based on the way you troll through these message boards after all of this time that you were the picture of calm, cool, and collected in dealing with or working out bumps in the road as they arose for your kid in the sport of swimming. Sounds like your kid was probably super-talented and you had tremendous expectations and input into how they should be trained. I hope it worked out for them in the end, and honestly hope you can find peace moving forward.

[Anonymous]

I'm not the PP you are replying to and I think their reference to the spreadsheet is a joke. I get the joke. Those of us that have had swimmers in the area for 5-10 years know about the "churn rate" at the prep site because you simply can't miss it when you have kids that are swimming against and friends with kids that train at that site.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not the PP you are replying to and I think their reference to the spreadsheet is a joke. I get the joke. Those of us that have had swimmers in the area for 5-10 years know about the "churn rate" at the prep site because you simply can't miss it when you have kids that are swimming against and friends with kids that train at that site.

I agree, the spreadsheet reference was likely not literal, but this part does show someone with a lot of unresolved issues, and I think that's what the comment above yours is referencing:

"Brucelickers will definitely try to spin it as natural selection/kids who just couldn’t cut it at the hands of the master. That’s a terrible take."

Sucks for them that they had such a negative experience. From the sounds of it, they also had to deal with all of the Covid shutdowns as well. Doesn't change the fact that the Gold groups at Prep today are back fully stocked and thriving from the looks of it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not the PP you are replying to and I think their reference to the spreadsheet is a joke. I get the joke. Those of us that have had swimmers in the area for 5-10 years know about the "churn rate" at the prep site because you simply can't miss it when you have kids that are swimming against and friends with kids that train at that site.

I agree, the spreadsheet reference was likely not literal, but this part does show someone with a lot of unresolved issues, and I think that's what the comment above yours is referencing:

"Brucelickers will definitely try to spin it as natural selection/kids who just couldn’t cut it at the hands of the master. That’s a terrible take."

Sucks for them that they had such a negative experience. From the sounds of it, they also had to deal with all of the Covid shutdowns as well. Doesn't change the fact that the Gold groups at Prep today are back fully stocked and thriving from the looks of it.

+1, full training groups, fast swimmers and younger swimmers in the pipeline. And for what it’s worth, from the parent of a non-Prep NCAP swimmer who has gotten to know some of the Prep swimmers at meets, etc., really nice kids too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not the PP you are replying to and I think their reference to the spreadsheet is a joke. I get the joke. Those of us that have had swimmers in the area for 5-10 years know about the "churn rate" at the prep site because you simply can't miss it when you have kids that are swimming against and friends with kids that train at that site.

I agree, the spreadsheet reference was likely not literal, but this part does show someone with a lot of unresolved issues, and I think that's what the comment above yours is referencing:

"Brucelickers will definitely try to spin it as natural selection/kids who just couldn’t cut it at the hands of the master. That’s a terrible take."

Sucks for them that they had such a negative experience. From the sounds of it, they also had to deal with all of the Covid shutdowns as well. Doesn't change the fact that the Gold groups at Prep today are back fully stocked and thriving from the looks of it.

+1, full training groups, fast swimmers and younger swimmers in the pipeline. And for what it’s worth, from the parent of a non-Prep NCAP swimmer who has gotten to know some of the Prep swimmers at meets, etc., really nice kids too.

I would add to that as well. My son swims for RMSC and goes up against these Prep Gold kids at the bigger meets. I'd have to agree with this. They have some very impressive swimmers. It's fun to watch them go at it. Yes, they do also seem like very nice kids.