NCAA Men's Division 1 Swimming Championships - Tyler Clary

The official list of swimmers invited to participate in the NCAA Men's Division 1 Swimming Championships was released today and can be found at: http://www.ncaaswim.com/pdf/m09_off_ps.pdf . The meet will take place on March 26-28, 2009.

Tyler Clary will be swimming in the 200y IM (in which he is ranked 2nd after Bradley Ally of Florida), 400y IM (in which he is ranked 1st), 200y Back (in which he is ranked 1st) and probably a relay or two. (Sorry, I just can't get excited about college relays.)

Tyler's best events are the same as Ryan's. This summer's national championships will be very interesting. I hope Tyler does well at the NCAAs and that he really pushes Ryan this summer.

Nevertheless, in my admittedly highly uneducated opinion, Tyler needs to improve his walls and underwater kicking if he's going to compete with Ryan. I haven't had many opportunities to watch Tyler swim, but I recently saw a video of his 400y IM performance at U.S. SC Nationals in December 2008 thanks to swimnetwork.com.

Tyler came in 2nd in that race and could have won except he popped up too quickly after his turns. The guy who ultimately won, Hidemasa Sano, had fantastic underwater kicks. Both had great times but Tyler could have been much faster had he stayed underwater longer. I mean it was obvious even to me and I'm certainly no expert. Tyler's time at SC Nationals was 3:40.96. He swam a 3:38.03 when he broke the NCAA record, which was nearly a 3 second improvement. Maybe Tyler has already improved his walls/underwater kicking and I just have had the opportunity to see it.

This brings up a question I've had for a while about underwater kicking. It looks really hard and like it would take a ton of strength training and practice to perfect. Is this why not everyone does it? It works so well for Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte, that it would seem obvious for every swimmer to do it....push hard off the walls on turns, stay under water as long as possible, and dophin kick like crazy. Yet most swimmers don't really do it. Is it something that requires a level of athleticism that only a few swimmers have? I certainly don't know the answer.