If you haven’t figured it out yet, we like data here at the Vibe and we love swimming! We’ve been fortunate enough, through the assistance of a bunch of really wonderful (and patient) high school coaches, to get a lot of high school meet data.
We’ve enjoyed posting the scores and everyone’s times and diving scores , but wanted to see if we could do a little more. The idea came up of using NISCA points and meet results to create a kind of performance ranking, so we gave it a shot.
For those not familiar with NISCA points, it’s a huge table with a continuum of times per event and corresponding points. Individual events top out at 300 points (thanks like faster than the current high school nation records) and go down to 0. Relays start at 600 and go down to 0. If you really like big tables of times, you can check it out here. Any times or diving scores slower or lower than the minimum are scored as a zero.
Our methodology scores the top three performances from each team in a meet for each event, including diving and relays and adds them all up to give the team a “team NISCA score” to give a quantitative value to a teams performance
Now, this comes with some serious disclaimers and is just a fun exercise in data so don’t get all bent out of shape by the results. Here’s a few things to consider.
- A team doesn’t always swim their best lineup, so team points can vary greatly between meets.
- We do our best to sift through the data to catch gratuitous errors or fat fingered diving scores, but I’m sure we miss a few. We have over 40,000 individual results
- One élite swimmer can pump up the teams points. In meet scoring, first is first weather it’s by .01 or a minute and a half. You get your first place points and that’s that. In NISCA points you can pad the stats a bit with an elite swimmer
So there you have it….you can check it out here or in the menu of the high school page. The main page is all meets sorted by team and date. From there you can see a list of just the top meets for each team from most points on down.