Top 20 NCAA Swimming Recruits In the Boys High School Class of 2021

By Jared Anderson on SwimSwam

It’s that time of year again where we at SwimSwam rank out the top 20 high school swimming prospects in the upcoming NCAA recruiting class.

As college recruiting has reached earlier and earlier into high school classes, we’re continually expanding our recruiting ranks and coverage. Last spring, we ranked out the then-sophomore class. This is essentially a re-rank of that class, taking into account a year of improvements. Stay tuned to our recruiting channel for more additions to our yearly recruiting coverage:

• Boys & Girls ranks for current juniors – high school class of 2021 (updated rankings from our “Way Too Early” rankings last spring)
• Way Too Early ranks for current sophomore boys & girls – high school class of 2022
• Re-Rank of outgoing senior boys & girls – high school class of 2020

Further reading:

• Way Too Early NCAA Recruiting Ranks: High School Boys Class of 2021 (as ranked last spring)

So without further ado, let’s take a look at this class as a whole, then review our ranking methodology (please read it before you get upset about how low the top miler is ranked!) and get into our rankings.

2020 addendum: We anticipate the counterarguments already: ‘So-and-so missed their taper meet due to coronavirus!’ ‘These ranks will give an advantage to swimmers who had their high school seasons in the fall!’ ‘We can’t possibly know how fast so-and-so would have gone!’ The questions, of course, are valid. But the best we can do is take the information we have now and make our best ‘snapshot’ rankings. If we’ve made a tweak this year to account for coronavirus cancellations, it’s taking long course improvement curves a little bit more into account – if someone came up with big long course drops last summer or at U.S. Open, that’s potentially the most recent data point we have, and can help us identify fast risers. And trying to predict who was and wasn’t tapered isn’t a new phenomenon this year. With that in mind, the point of these rankings is discussion, and we’ve now got a whole new layer of analysis to discuss in the comment section this time around.

THIS CLASS

• A class incredibly tailored to the NCAA format – multi-stroke sprinters abound
• Very sprint-based class – 50/100 a lot stronger than 200
• Relatively light in distance swimmers at the top
• Great class for 200 IMers
• Tons of fast risers
• Not a terribly deep fly group
• A lot of big-time long course swimmers as well

Last year, we noted how good of a sprint class this was, and they’ve only gotten better. The top swimmers in the class in the 50 and 100 frees are the fastest juniors we’ve seen since Ryan Hoffer in the class of 2017. And what really makes this class stand out is how well swimmers transfer their speed between strokes. If we had to classify each swimmer in an event discipline, we’d probably consider three of our top four prospects as ‘general sprinters’ rather than confining them to one stroke or another.

On the flip side, this isn’t a great distance class. Every year, we seem to get at least one high school standout who is below 15 minutes in the mile – in fact, you have to go back to the Class of 2014 before you find a group without a miler under 15. That shortage in this class extends down to the 500 (where no one is under 4:20), and the 200 is slightly weaker than previous classes, relatively speaking.

Rather than 200 freestylers, though, this group is stacked with 200 IMers. It feels like every other recruit has a 1:47-or-better IM in their back pocket, often as a bonus event along with their main specialty. The IMs tend to show the most improvement from the high school level to the college level (consider that according to last year’s NISCA All-American lists, only five high schoolers of any grade broke 1:46 in the IM, while it took 1:43.0 just to score at 2019 NCAAs), so we’d expect this class to yield some eventual superstars. We may be entering an era where 1:39-or-better gets much, much more common at the NCAA meet.

This class is also rising extremely fast as a whole. Last year’s juniors were surprisingly hit-or-miss based on time changes from our sophomore ranks to our junior re-rank. But this class had a whole bunch of junior-year explosions, even with some athletes missing meets due to the coronavirus pandemic.

If there’s a stroke that gets short shrift here, it’s probably fly. There are a lot of versatile types that cross over into fly, but not many pure flyers in our ranks.

We’ve also got a good amount of big-name long course swimmers, though there aren’t as many of the great-at-long-course-but-only-OK-at-short-course types we usually see (and struggle hard to rank accurately).

**The 1000 free isn’t an event at the Division I NCAA Championships, but is swum instead of the 1650 in many Division I dual meets and is part of the NCAA program in Division II.

THE METHODOLOGY

Our goal in these rankings is to reflect what college coaches look for in recruits, based on many years of conversations and coverage.

We focus only on American-based athletes, simply because there is so much uncertainty with international recruits – if they’ll come to the states, when they’ll come to the states and with what graduating class they should be ranked. Projecting international recruits often becomes more a discussion of when they’ll first join a college program and not which program they’ll join.

A few other factors that weigh heavily in our rankings:

• Relay Value – Relay points count double in college swimming, and any program needs a strong stable of quality sprinters to fill out all 5 relays with studs. Obviously, a special distance swimmer can easily rank ahead of a very good 100 freestyler, but college swimming generally values a sprint freestyler over a distance swimmer, all other factors being equal.
• Improvements – Actual times are a the trump card, but any big improvements in quality can make a difference as well. For example, a swimmer who only took up year-round swimming as a junior in high school going the same time as a swimmer whose been swimming year-round since they were 8 will probably get the edge in our rankings. Think Breeja Larson.
• Short Course over Long Course – we recognize that some programs, many programs, put their focus with their high school aged swimmers on long course, especially depending on when the high school championships may fall. That said, college swimming is short course, so a swimmer who is great in short course but struggles in long course will have the advantage over the reverse.
• NCAA scoring ability – NCAAs are the big show for college teams, so we’ve weighted NCAA scoring potential very highly. Swimmers who already have NCAA scoring times wind up mostly filling out the top our of rankings. Since college athletic directors – and by extension coaches – also place high value on conference championships, scoring ability at conference meets is also a factor in our rankings.
• Relative depth in the NCAA and recruiting class – a wealth of elite depth nationwide in one stroke discipline makes a big difference in what times are considered more valuable in that event. Events rise at different rates in the NCAA, but when one event gets extremely deep and fast at the college level, it makes high school prospects in those events a little less valuable, relatively, with lots of other veteran options. In the same way, a recruiting class stacked with swimmers in butterfly, for example, would make each butterflyer a little less sought-after in the market, with lots of other recruiting options able to provide similar production.

Of course, there’s no way to predict the future, and the most concrete data we have to go on are cold, hard times. These rankings in no way mean that all of these 20 swimmers will be NCAA standouts, and they certainly don’t mean that no swimmer left off this list will make big contributions at the NCAA level.

With that out of the way, let’s get to our rankings.

Disclaimer: there are a lot of high school seniors in the country, and no really good, complete, 100% accurate listing of them all. If you don’t see your favorite swimmer on the list, feel free to politely point them out in the comments. There’s a chance that we disagree with your assessment of their spot in the top 20, and so long as it’s done civilly, there’s no problem with differences of opinions. There’s also a chance that we’ve simply missed a no-brainer (we’ve taken every precaution to avoid that), and if that happens, we want to make sure we correct it.

TOP 20 SWIMMERS FROM THE CLASS OF 2021

1.Aiden Hayes (Previous Rank: #2) – Sooner Swim Club – Norman North High School – Norman, OK **Verbally committed to NC State**
Best Times: 100 fly – 46.01, 200 fly – 1:41.34, 50 free – 19.58, 100 back – 46.31, 100 free – 44.01

Hayes surges into our #1 rank, in large part because of monstrous improvements to his 200 fly. At this time last year, Hayes was a pure 50/100 type with a 46.6 100 fly but only 1:47 200 fly. He’s blown out both times, going to 46.0/1:41.3, and the latter of those times actually would have scored at 2019 NCAAs. A few factors bumped Hayes over Grimm for the time being. His top three events fit together very nicely in the NCAA format. The 200 fly development shows way more range than we thought he had a year ago. And Hayes has the better 50 free and significantly better 100 free, which adds a lot more relay value. Here’s Hayes’ lifetime-best 100 fly (lane 5 with the blue cap) – he’s got awesome turns and a picture-perfect butterfly. There’s also valuable room for improvement, though. His underwater kicks seem to lose steam and there’s a little drop in intensity between his kickout and his breakout stroke. The 200 fly is the same (blue cap, lane 4) – he went straight from 1:47 to 1:41 in a single day, and he’s going to have plenty more time to drop with experience and polishing in that race. And just for fun, here’s his 50 free (blue cap, lane 5), where you get a better picture of how good his underwaters are, and where he does a better job transitioning between his dolphin kicks and his breakout stroke.

2.Anthony Grimm (Previous Rank: #1) – Mason Makos Swim Team – Oakton High School – Fairfax, VA **Verbally committed to Texas**
Best Times: 100 back – 45.60, 100 breast – 52.51, 50 free – 19.67, 100 fly – 47.40, 100 free – 46.59

Grimm is probably one of the best pure athletes we’ve ever seen in these rankings. He’s got unparalleled fast-twitch strength, high-level underwaters, and a crazy sprinting ability across all four strokes. Here’s his lifetime-best 100 back from last spring. (Grimm is in lane 4 in the white cap with no logo – you’ll know which one he is by the start alone). He’s got a brilliant backstroke start, and one big factor that you don’t see above is how good Grimm is in the 50 back. As a sophomore, he went 20.8 leading off a 200 medley relay. That would have been the 5th-fastest split in the entire NCAA meet a month later and gives him another avenue for relay impact early in his career. Grimm has two things working against him in this year’s ranks. He dealt with a back injury this year and missed some training, which led to a lack of time drops in his high school season. And based on his