Boys' Meet Preview

So, as many of you know, the psych sheets for the State Meet came out this past weekend (they can be found here). As it stands per The News Journal, the top 5 Boys' Teams through February 16th were:

1. Salesianum (9-2)
2. A.I. du Pont (13-0-1)
3. Del. Military (9-0)
4. Charter of Wilm. (11-0-1)
5. St. Mark’s (10-1)

It seems to me that the most underrated team here is probably Charter, seeing as they tied A.I. this year (although A.I. was missing some key performers for that meet), and, while they never swam DMA directly, it seems that Charter would tend to have a depth advantage over DMA as well. So, with the Psych Sheets out, I used them to calculate scores for any team with 100+ "psych sheet" points. I have published the results here.

A few notes on the score sheet:

• The top 3 rows are the relay scores - 200 Medley, 200 Free, and 400 Free, and the points each team is "seeded" with there.
• After that, each event has 4 rows dedicated to it (4 is the maximum number of entrants per team for any given event).
• In general, the darker the score box, the more points a team scores there, so it gives a nice visual representation of which teams are scoring more points and where.
• Also, the relays are in red, then the events alternate orange and green for no reason other than to clearly distinguish between the events.
• At the bottom, the final column is the expected total score for that team, and for those of you who don't wish to view the entire document, here are the scores (again, only of teams with greater than 100 points):

1. Salesianum - 455
2. Charter - 260
3. A. I. - 229
4. DMA - 192
5. St. Mark's - 178
6. Brandywine - 149
7. Tatnall - 105

So, as it stands, it looks like The News Journal has the right top 5 teams, just not necessarily in the right order (although, things are close enough that those rankings can easily change, probably with the exception of Salesianum in first).

A few comments about the meet:

• Just as a bit of a housekeeping item, a reminder on scoring:

1st=20, 2nd=17, 3rd=16, 4th=15, 5th=14, 6th=13, 7th=12, 8th=11, 9th=9, 10th=7, 11th=6, 12th=5, 13th=4, 14th=3, 15th=2, and 16th=1 for all individual events. Points are doubled for relays.

• Also, a note I probably made last year regarding relays, is that I would guess they have the most potential to change at the meet. Most relay entry times are entered as the fastest possible combination of any four swimmers on the team. However, with an entry limitation of two relays per swimmer, if a team's best 50/100 Freestyle swimmer swam in the fastest recorded time for each of the relays, now he can only be entered into two of those relays. So, the team has to give up some time in one of the relays.

• Finally, keep in mind that not all of the seed times reflect the swimmers' best times. Many swimmers have faster times than those listed in meets outside of the high school competitions that are not included in high school states seed times, and they could potentially change their places drastically at the meet.

As a bit of commentary on this year's meet in particular, it looks like Salesianum is going to have smooth sailing to yet another state title. The battle for second is a little closer, but seeing as A.I. is missing some key swimmers for the meet, it looks like they will be sitting in third. DMA could surprise A.I. for third, but I would guess the competition would be tougher for them with St. Mark's, and maybe even a little from Brandywine. Tatnall, with a small team, for now is in 7th, but there are other teams not far below the 100 point mark who could give them a run for their money.

Best of luck to everyone at the meet this week, hope you all don't see any snow! I will have a girls' meet preview soon, hopefully within the next hour, otherwise, check back later tonight.