MCSL Preliminary Rankings 2017
All the cards have been played and the Preliminary 2017 MCSL Division Assignments are now in. Lots of moving and shaking going on for next year.
Teams are assigned to divisions each year based on a computer swim-off using times from the previous year (i.e., contrary to popular belief, division assignments are not based on teams’ win/loss records from the prior year). That is, at the end of each season, MCSL creates a virtual team for each MCSL team using the median times from its 5 dual meets and then runs a computerized swim-off (i.e., virtual meet) of each virtual team against every other virtual team. The 6 teams that have the most wins end up in Division A, and those with the fewest wins are placed in Division O.
In the past, new teams automatically were placed in the last Division. Now, however, if a new team entering MCSL is an established team and has a record of times swum, that team may be placed in a Division that more closely approximates the strength of the new team.
Congrats to all for an outstanding season. See you at All-Stars.
The domination continues.
RRR, given that MCSL’s Rockville Rays team is virtually indistinguishable from RMSC’s Rockville site (e.g., swimmers who enroll in both teams get a discount – see e.g., http://www.rockvillerays.us/about, the 2 teams share the same pool and many of the same swimmers), the Rockville Rays enjoy a huge competitive advantage over every other MCSL team and thus should always be dominant and never have an excuse for losing to another MCSL team. And this doesn’t even account for the strong presumption that Rockville actively recruited the many Upper County swimmers that moved to Rockville this season.
And don’t confuse the Rockville Rays (which is a City of Rockville team) with County teams like Germantown, Upper County, Bethesda, Glenmont, Long Branch, Poolesville. The County pools don’t offer RMSC discounts or have the overlap in swimmers/pools that Rockville has.
On top of the unfair competitive advantage that Rockville has built for itself, I hope that you, Rockville Rays Rule, continue to be so obnoxious on this site in order to build the furor among everyone else in the league that’s needed to finally kick Rockville out of the league (or at least get boycotted next year).
RRC hit this right on the head
(1) Fact 1: MCSL already denied the recruiting allegation against Rockville by Stonegate. It is false and baseless, just pure imagination.
(2) Fact 2: Most Stonegate coaches are from RMSC-MLK site and most top swimmers at Stonegate are also from the same site. Sounds recruiting to me.
I would probably add…
Fact #3: If MCSL did not want all the county/city pools in the org, then the reps would never have voted to accept their request to join and/or extended invitations for them to join in the first place. I’m pretty sure this is addressed somewhere in the MCSL 50th Anniversary Blog.
Peter, the problem is not in allowing public pools to compete in MCSL. There are many legitimate reasons why public pools should be allowed to compete in MCSL, including the fact that waiting lists and expense prevent many kids from joining private pools. The problem arises when government abuses its position and takes advantage of its ability to effectively merge an MCSL team and a USAS team to offer a 2 for 1 deal to year around swimmers that private teams can’t compete with.
What Sotnegate really want is to kick Rockville out of the league so it can win the Division A title every year with all RMSC-MLK swimmers.
Potamacer, you missed the point. The City of Rockville has made it cheaper and easier for a swimmer at RMSC’s Rockville site to simply stay at the Rockville Municipal Swim Center and swim for the Rockville Rays than to pay more and travel elsewhere to go to another MCSL team. No other MCSL team offers such an attractive 2 for 1 deal to year-around swimmers. In the case of Stonegate, yes, Brian Cheng coaches at both RMSC’s MLK site and Stonegate, but Stonegate doesn’t practice at MLK (they practice 4.4 miles away at the Stonegate pool), a swimmer at RMSC’s MLK site can’t swim for Stonegate if he or she doesn’t live in the Stonegate subdivision (Rockville doesn’t have these geographic restrictions), and a swimmer doesn’t get a discount to swim for both Stonegate and RMSC MLK. It’s quite extraordinary that Rockville has been allowed to basically merge an MCSL team with a USAS-sanctioned team.
As for the recruitment charge, it’s hard to enforce MCSL’s anti-recruitment rule because if the swimmers who move to the new team don’t admit to being recruited, how else can MCSL find “sufficient evidence of recruitment”. Just because the Division A protesters couldn’t show sufficient evidence of Rockville having recruited Upper County swimmers doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Given Rockville’s shocking 2 for 1 practices described above, it wouldn’t be surprising to find it did happen.
The website for Stonegate says that membership is limited “only to the residents of the Stonegate Subdivision and vicinity, regarded as those who live within a three mile radius of Stonegate Pool, except as otherwise determined in the discretion of the Board.” That’s much larger than just the subdivision and it’s a much larger area than most neighborhood pools draw from. Also, that last section about Board discretion is a loophole that essentially opens up membership to anyone who the Board decides they want. I don’t think Rockville belongs in the MCSL, but using half-truths (or less than half-truths…) does not help the cause.
By the way, most MCSL swimmers don’t care who wins A, B, F or O. They care about their teams, their friends, their coaches and the great times they have every summer.
Thank you to the new owners of RFTW for all the great work they’ve done since taking over the site.
In re: above and “Rockville recruiting UC swimmers”…
A comment I heard, was that a lot of the families that were formerly on the UC team last year and did not re-join UC, did not even join ANY OTHER team THIS year. Obviously I have not independently verified this, but the source IMHO is reliable (came from a person not associated with UC but was familiar with what went on and is from another pool in that vicinity). I’m sure cross-referencing results from last year with the swimmer stats available here would provide some backup of that.
As to the other “factoid”….the pool we belong to has quite a few kids in ASA, Tiburons, and RMSC. Certainly if they wanted to jump ship and go to Rockville they can; I mean, it’s A LOT cheaper to quit us and go to Rockville or Bethesda pools. BUT: they don’t because this is the neighborhood pool, they walk to it, it’s where all their school peeps go, and we’re a fun place to be in the summer when it’s 100 (like today). So it’s all about choices. And it’s just SUMMER SWIMMING!! So cool your jets since we don’t take it THAT seriously. 🙂
As a separate comment….by extension therefore, does not EVERY MCSL team that has at least ONE kid in ASA, NCAP, Tiburons, RMSC, etc. cheat by having said kids on their team?
What’s your cure RRC? Have MCSL ban kids from participating in summer swim leagues if they belong to one of these orgs?
Dude…ITS SUMMER SWIMMING. Chill out.
Congrats to country glen on their move to A. A great swim team with great spirit and great coaching. Most deserving team around.
Upper County falling from “A” all the way to “O” is pretty sad to see.
Don’t be sad! We are rebuilding and growing. We WILL be back in A, stronger, and more spirited than ever!
I give the swimmers of Upper County an A for their 2016 season. The swimmers that remained and swam in A division under less than ideal circumstances…good for you. We look forward to seeing you back in the A division soon.
Hi Nancy, we all wish you good luck! Sorry that your season played out the way that it did.
Congrats to all! Looks like theres a lot of teams in new divisions next summer-should be fun!
How hard would it be to have a division of Germantown
Bethesda upper county and Rockville
Jason Tang
Jolie Lefauve
Eric Feng
Nathan Kim
Bouke Edskes
Lynn Zhang are all transfers from UC
Rockville also sports transfers from Lakelands and Potomac Glen, aswell as 4 from Germantown 2 summers ago
i. If sufficient evidence of recruiting or unusual movement of multiple
swimmers to a specific MCSL team is presented to the MCSL Rules
Committee and is deemed by that committee to negatively affect the
MCSL’s legitimate interest in stability and fairness as stated in “7.a
Purpose”, that team may be forced to forfeit the points awarded to the
swimmers in question for all meets in the current MCSL season, resulting
in those meets being rescored.
iii. Swimmers will not be considered to have been recruited if they: 1)
swam for their current team during the previous season, 2) swam for a
different team the previous season, but did not swim in an “A” meet, 3)
moved residence within the past two seasons or 4) swam for a team in the
previous season that withdrew from the MCSL.
(1) Lynn Zhang has never been with UC and Jason Tang and Bouke Edskes used to swim for Rockville a few years back. Do your home work first.
(2) MCSL already completed the investigation and concluded that the allegation from Stonegate was totally false and baseless. I think RFTW needs publish the MCSL’s decision here.
Ok, I finally had time to fix my original query.
So looking at A meets only, looks like UC lost 17 swimmers. They may have lost more but my data only has A meets.
RV did get the most, but it’s not the only club with 3 UC swimmers. LV and NO are the others.
UC A meet swimmers go down from 70 (2014) to 67 (2015) and 33 this year.
Here are the breakdown of the migration:
LM 3
RV 3
NO 3
HA 2
EG 1
RS 1
BE 1
TH 1
PGL 1
QV 1
…and so pretty much refuting the implied idea that “everyone” from UC went to Rockville……
Stonegate singled out Rockville because Rockville blocks its way to the divisional title.
Because Stonegate deserves the division title. Without the UC swimmers stonegate takes the relay carnival and potentially the dual meet.
Building a super strong team (Rockville Rays) based on RMSC swimmers is not good and it’s not good first of all for the Rockville Rays swimmers. The MCSL is not NBA, and our swimming league has a different priority. In MCSL, winning should not be everything; team and team spirit is more important for kids! The MCSL and parents should not support such “smart strategy”, and building of “super team”. Let’s be reasonable!
No one has brought up the most important thing. The kids. The kids I see swimming at Rockville (and Germantown too) are all FRIENDS. The kids spend the better part of their lives together. Why wouldn’t they want to spend their summers together? These kids are no different than a community team in that regard. They chose these teams to be with the people they like. Rockville is a community team. Just not in the sense everyone wants it to be.
As we have come to expect, each summer, apoplectic swim parents rant at RFTW about Rockville Swim Center, RMSC and their devious quest for MCSL domination, if not world domination. Wake up folks, you should realize that this is just summer league swimming and anyone who understands the sport is not lying awake at night wondering whether Rockville or Stonegate will win the Division A relay carnival next year.
MCSL rules says that a swimmer must be a member of the pool, including workers if they want to swim on the team. But, they allow the teams at the public pools to only pay for the swim team, and NOT pay for the yearly membership. The yearly membership at these pools is NOT higher than most community pools. Additionally, the public pools don’t require an initiation fee to join.
Setting geographical limits for the public pools, requiring the swimmers to hold pool memberships and limiting movement if the family does NOT move residents would go a long way in preventing the creation of the power teams. Yes, the county pools have a pseudo membership. In fact, one membership allows you to use ALL county pools, including the indoor pools.
UCD died by their own sword. They recruited in their glory days too! When you pull top swimmers from lower Rockville all the way up to Damascus to your team when these swimmers have community pools that they belong to should not be allowed. In the case of the 15-18 year old kids (boys in particular), they got together and planned to leave to UCD when the coaching change was announced. The County could have held that team together if they went with Jenn’s recommendation for her head coach replacement. And certain remaining UCD parents should NOT have publically blasted the departing swimmers and out going coaches. Several of those swimmers were still weighing their options for the 2016 summer. Those negative comments cemented their decision NOT to return!
Food for thought…
Lynn Zhang is not a transfer, she’s been here at Rockville for a long time.
Also, saying that our team cheats is just plain rude and immature especially making it you’re name here. The MCSL Board has already denied the protest, there really is no need to be so caught up and salty about it. Honestly, get over it, what’s done is done. Everyone needs to chill out.