As pretty much every Division I college swimming program in the United States gets into gear for the 2015-2016 season and looks ahead to March’s NCAA championship meet, they will have one less burden to worry about while training for the season’s biggest collegiate competition.
One of the biggest burdens on athletes at the NCAA Division I Swimming and Diving Championships has been the grueling 200 free-800 free relay on the second day of the meet. For many athletes, that means swimming three 200-yard freestyles in one day, often racing all three at top speed. That burden has been lifted by the NCAA Council, which voted in July to remove the 800 free relay from the second day of the meet and create an extra day of competition.
The 800 free relay will still remain a timed final event and will be swum on a Wednesday evening, according to the proposal by the NCAA. This makes the Division I championships a four-day meet, which had been a topic of discussion for many years to ease the long timeline for finals. In place of the 800 free relay will be the 200 medley relay, which moves from the start of the session to the end. That day also includes five individual swimming events and was often the longest finals session of the meet.
The ruling does not affect the Division II or Division III meets, as they are already four days long, mostly because those championships feature men and women in one meet, and have the 1000 free as an added event.
“The recommended adjustments to the current format reduces the length of the Friday sessions by as much as an hour,” according to the document provided to the council by the NCAA Swimming and Diving Committee.
The budget to run the meet will remain unchanged, according to Mary Berdo, Associate Director of Championships and Alliances for the NCAA. Officials will have already be in Atlanta for the 2016 women’s and men’s competitions, and she said local officials will be on standby if needed for backup for Wednesday’s session.
This ruling nearly falls in line with the lineup for several college conference meets, which also put the 200 medley relay on a special relay-only day. That format has allowed for some teams to post very fast swims that are often not replicated at the NCAA championships. Just this year, the women’s swim team at California broke the 800 free relay American record at the Pac 12 championships, but couldn’t replicate it at the NCAA meet. The Texas men and Georgia women have previously broken American records in the event on relay-only days at their conference meets in the past decade, but the physical demands of the meet kept them from lowering it at the NCAA championships.
The NCAA also voted to move the start times of the prelims and finals sessions. Instead of an 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. start times, the prelim session will begin at 10 a.m. and finals will begin at 6 p.m. That’s good news for athletes who compete in the last event of the meet and often remain at the facility until nearly 11 p.m.
The 4 day format seems like the perfect situation to finally add the 1000 Freestyle to competition. It would weight distance swimming a little more heavily for programs and team scoring and at the same time would enhance the importance of mid distance/ distance development in the U.S.
That might require more juggling of the schedule. As it stands, those who might do the 1000 might be doing it on the new day three of the meet, the day before the 1650. And if they put it on the new first day, some of those who swim the 1000 might also be on the 800 free relay and wouldn’t do well on the relay after a 1000 free. Perhaps the Division I schedule will mirror the Division II and III schedules soon with this change.