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Calculating Your Power Index (Recruiting Score)

  • Updated

Note: The process for calculating Power Indexes is changing on July 1, 2025.  

Class of 2026 and Later

Your recruiting score—called the Power Index—is like a GPA for swimming. It’s based on your fastest times and is designed to reflect your potential in college swimming, using data and feedback from hundreds of college coaches. The formula updates each summer to reflect the evolving nature of the sport and ensure fairness across recruiting classes.

Point Assignment

Points are assigned to each swim time based on how close it is to the base time—the actual time needed to qualify for the NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Championships. These base times are reviewed and updated annually to stay aligned with college swimming trends.

Event Selection

We select your four highest-scoring events, based on Power Points. Only one course per event is included—meaning if you have multiple times in the 200 free (SCY, LCM, SCM), only your best one is used.

Starting in 2025, all stroke 50s—50 back, 50 breast, and 50 fly—are now eligible. This change reflects their growing presence in dual and conference meets, and their importance to coaches assessing relay potential.

The Formula

Your Power Index is calculated as a weighted average of your top events:

  • Event #1 and #2: Each counts 100% toward your score.
  • Event #3: Weighted at 25%. This reflects analysis showing most swimmers are 13–33% weaker in their third-best event compared to their top two.
  • Event #4: Weighted at 5%. This event is included primarily to break ties and has a minimal impact on your score.

If you don’t have results in a third or fourth event, those are assigned a default score of 100 points. This creates a clear incentive to post times in at least three events.

 

How to Calculate Your Power Points

Power points are calculated from your fastest official time in an event and the base time for that event.  Here's the actual Formula

Power Points = (((Your Time ÷ Base Time)^3) - 1) × 100 + 1

Power Points Calculator







 

 

Class of 2025 and Earlier

Your recruiting score is like a GPA, but for swimming. It's based on your fastest times in up to five events. The formula is designed to meet college coaches' needs and reflect the relative strength of each recruiting class. Here's an outline of how it is calculated.

Point Assignment

Points are assigned to each of your swim times based on how close they are to the times needed to qualify for the NCAA Division I Swimming and Diving Championships.

Points are calculated on the basis of the ACTUAL time needed to qualify for the NCAA Division I Swimming and Diving Championships. 

Event Selection

We select your five highest-scoring events. To ensure diversity in skill assessment, we select the highest-scoring time from any identical events swum, irrespective of the course. (ie we will not use your 200 SCY Freestyle, 200 SCM Freestyle and 200 LCM Freestyle, but rather the best of the three.)

Relay Considerations

We include your best 50 or 100 Freestyle time in our calculations to account for the significant role freestyle relays play in team scoring at meets. We exclude 50s of other strokes due to limited data and the unique team requirements for these events.

The Formula

  • Start with Your Two Best Events - We take your two best events and gives you points based on how close your times are to NCAA qualifying standards (called “base times”). These points are averaged together.

  • Add a Boost to Keep Things Fair - To make sure no swimmer starts with a perfect score (which would make ranking tough), we add a standard adjustment (usually around 0.95). This makes sure every swimmer’s starting score is above 1.00.

  • Third Event Gets Added, But Not Equally - We then look at your third-best event. If it’s better than your average, your score improves. If it’s not, it might bring your score down. But it’s only counted at 75% weight, not fully.

  • Fourth and Fifth Events Count Even Less - The fourth event is weighted at 50%, the fifth at 25%, and to account for sprinting we take your 50 or 100 free and weight it at 10%.

Each additional event helps your score, but only a little. That means it’s great to be versatile, but your top 2-3 events matter most.

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