Which Women's Event Was Most Difficult To Qualify In For NCAAs?

03/18/2025 05:42 PM

By Sam Blacker on SwimSwam

2025 NCAA Division I Women's Swimming and Diving Championships

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The cutline for NCAA qualification is determined in a way to ensure that all events end up with (almost) the same number of direct qualifiers. A result of this is that not all qualifications are equal – some events are deeper than others, and the fight for those final few spots fiercer. Which then is the most difficult event to qualify in?

Depth

There is an easy way to look at the depth in each event – the NCAA 'A' and 'B' cuts. The 'A' cut is calculated as the average of the 8th place time in the NCAAs from each of the past three years, with the caveat that the 'A' cut cannot be slower than in a previous year. The 'B' cut is determined similarly, but using the 125th place time instead.

‘A’ Cuts

‘B’ Cuts

The 'A' cuts are about right, with the majority falling within +-2 of that goal of 8, but there are far more swimmers under the 'B' cuts this year than 125. The 50 free and 100 fly are standouts, both with 176 swimmers under their respective B cuts (when adding together the totals of 'A' and 'B' cuts). Even the 1650, the event with the fewest, has 142.

Do more 'B' cuts mean more 'A' cuts, or vice versa? And do either of them track well to how difficult the qualification for NCAAs is in each event?

Graphs, Graphs, Graphs

If you're a visual learner you'll love this next part. We've distilled the key information from the A and B cuts this year into a series of graphs with one startlingly clear takeaway – the 500 free this year was incredibly fast.

The 500 is miles clear of the rest here. At least one swimmer with an 'A' cut won't score this year, and there's a world where it takes a 4:33 just to make the 'A'  final. Only six of these swimmers are seniors as well, which is the same as the number that are freshmen, and not a single one is listed as a fifth year.

Fly and breaststroke look to have the least depth at the top, and the 200 breaststroke especially does stand out for its lack of stars. Only three women have been under the 'A' cut this season and one of them (Alex Walsh) won't swim the event, although there are a further three in the field with a PB under 2:05.73.

The 'B' cuts appear almost the other way around – breaststroke and fly are up near the top while the 500 free has the fewest of all 13 events. Note that this is a count of purely 'B' cuts, not 'A' and 'B' combined. There appears to be quite a disconnect between the number of each cut for a lot of events that's perhaps easiest to see in the next graph.

There's a slight but noticeable downward trend here, even without taking the 500 free into account.  It's one that likely feels counter intuitive. The fewer 'A' cuts in an event this year, the more 'B' cuts there have been. Whilst it could be that an event simply has more depth further down and no heavyweights fighting it out at the top, there's another explanation:

Not all 'B' cuts are created equal. They're all based on the same criteria, however that criteria is based on number of swimmers rather than being a set percentage slower than the 'A' cut. The trend now makes much more sense – slower 'B' cuts are more susceptible to an influx of swimmers – but there are four fairly distinct groups that form.

Probably the most interesting is the group in the top left. These events have slower 'B' cuts, between 5% and 6% slower than the 'A', but without the bump in depth that we see over on the right hand side. In fact, for the medleys and mile there's not many more swimmers than in the 500, which has the most difficult 'B' cut to attain of any event. It's also interesting to note that the freestyle events make up five of the six fastest 'B' cuts by ratio.

The stroke events all fall around 5.5%-6% slower and have similar depth with the exception of the 200 fly and, surprisingly, the 100 backstroke. For an event with nine 'A' cuts and one that the US dominates the world rankings in, falling in the bottom half of events in terms of 'B' cuts despite the 'B' cut time being the third slowest is unexpected.

Qualification

Now that we've had a look at the depth in each event, we can take a look at the key question – How difficult was it to qualify for each event at NCAAs? We'll make use of two ratios here:

1. The 'B' cut/'A' cut ratio
2. The final qualified swimmer's time/'A' cut ratio

It's important to note that the final swimmer is not always at the same season-wide ranking. Event choices take swimmers such as Gretchen Walsh and Bella Sims out of events they are ranked highly for.

The trend line here represents the relationship between the two ratios. We'd expect the trend of these two variables to agree reasonably well, even though swimmers' times are not completely evenly distributed.  Events above the line were slower than average this year, events below were faster. There are three quicker events here that stand out; the 100 back, 1650 free and 500 free. Each one of these events was harder to qualify for given the relative strength of its 'B' cut.

We can quantify the relationship from this graph with the ratio of the two ratios, which we'll call the Difficulty Factor. This can tell us pretty definitively which events were the most difficult to make the cut in compared to their 'B' cuts.

What we can look at as well with these times is the number of swimmers that would have qualified in each event if they were the cutlines. Mathematically this would be each point moving either up or down until it meets the line. Here's a look at how two times compare, and how the number of swimmers in each event would differ if this were the case.

We have not included any swimmers who would have already been under the cutline but chose not to enter the event.

The 100 free would lose 13 swimmers, over a full heat, whilst the three events we mentioned before jump to nearly 50. In the 100 free there is only a drop of 0.14 seconds, but there are 11 swimmers in this narrow range.

There's one final example of just how exceptionally quick the top of the 500 free has been so far this year. We've normalised the percentage of  by the percentage difference between the 'A' and 'B' cuts, but even so this event stands out – and should be an incredible start to the individual events.

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