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The Method

How we rank swim

Team Power Rating

The Power Rating is a single number that captures how strong a team would be at the State Championship. Bigger is better.

Here's the idea: for every event (50 free, 100 free, 100 fly, and so on) we compare each swimmer's best time to every other California high schooler in that event. Swim faster than the typical CA swimmer and you contribute positive points. Swim slower and you contribute negative points. The further from the typical time you are — in either direction — the bigger the contribution.

For each of the 8 individual championship events, we add up the school's top 3 swimmers (the lineup that would actually score at a championship dual meet). For each of the 3 relay events, we add the school's best relay performance. Total it all up across the 11 events — that's the Power Rating.

A team with one or two elite swimmers can post a strong Power Rating even with a thin roster. The Squad Strength number below shows whether the rest of the team pulls weight too.

Squad Strength

Squad Strength shows depth — not just the stars, but the whole roster.

We look at every swimmer on the team who's swum a valid individual event this season, and ask: on average, how does this roster compare to the typical California high schooler? A positive number means the average swimmer is faster than typical. A negative number means slower. Numbers further from zero are a stronger signal in either direction.

A team with a high Power Rating but a low or negative Squad Strength is top-heavy — a few stars carrying the program. A team with both numbers high is a deep program developing swimmers throughout the roster.

Small roster caveat:When a team has fewer than 15 swimmers, Squad Strength can swing a lot from any single fast or slow result. Below 8 swimmers we mark the number with an asterisk (*) — the depth signal isn't reliable at that small a sample.

Athlete Leaderboards

Athlete leaderboards rank each swimmer by their best Short Course Yards (SCY) time in an event for the season. One result per athlete per event per season — the fastest. Filters narrow by gender, grade, league, CIF section/area, and competition tier.

Grade is derived from each swimmer's graduation year using an August-1 academic-year boundary. Athletes without a known graduation year still appear on overall leaderboards but cannot be filtered by grade.

Data Sources

Times are gathered from every California CIF section (CIF-SS, CIF-SDS, CIF-LACS, CIF-CCS, CIF-NCS, CIF-SJS, CIF-CS, CIF-NS, CIF-SF, Oakland) and a few other public meet-result feeds. Our team tier-classifies each source and only verified, official results are surfaced in rankings.

Long Course Meters and Short Course Meters times are excluded from rankings — those are USA Swimming / club courses, not high school competition.

School-name reconciliation is ongoing. If a swimmer appears under an unexpected school, or two schools that should be one show separately, we're still cleaning up identity edge cases — rankings will sharpen as that work continues.

Season Definition

A "season" runs August 1 of one year through July 31 of the next, labeled by the spring year. The 2026 season runs Aug 1 2025 → Jul 31 2026; CIF spring HS swim championships within that window are the season's climax.

What we don't know

Swimming data is incomplete by nature, and we'd rather tell you what we don't have than pretend the picture is complete:

  • Coverage by section: NorCal, Central, and SF section programs are still catching up to our CIF-SS / CIF-SDS depth. We're ingesting more meets each night.
  • Dual meets in some leagues never get published anywhere we can read. Times from those meets are not in our system.
  • Club times are intentionally excluded. A swimmer who runs a faster time at a USA Swimming meet than they ever ran in a HS event will appear slower in our rankings — that's by design.
  • School-name reconciliation is ongoing. If a swimmer appears under an unexpected school, or two schools that should be one show separately, we're still cleaning up identity edge cases.
  • Coaches and athletes cannot yet submit their own results. That capability is coming.

Our rankings are our team's opinion based on what we have, scored using the methodology described above. Confident in how we rank — always open to more data.