Swimming Blogs - Chris DeSantis

In case you haven’t noticed yet, I am a pure, unadulterated, swim nerd. In college, you could most often find me reclining on my futon with my laptop perched on my stomach, my eyes in a deep trance. My teammates characterized my habit innocently as “looking at swim times”. In truth, I was searching for not only times but any coverage I could get of our sport. As I explained to my non-swimming friends, you can’t turn on ESPN Sportscenter to see highlights of Summer Nationals. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Red Sox, I just don’t care about them as much as I care about swimming. I know if you’re reading this you’re probably a swim nerd to some degree for another, so I thought I would post my personal guide to killing at least a few hours a day being a swim fan online.

I’m breaking the sites up into categories. Sites have different strengths in terms of coverage, so I use them for different things. Enjoy!

Results:

www.swimmingworldmagazine.com - My personal original source for swimming news. Nowadays you need to navigate through a few articles advertising the latest snorkel on the market, but in between you find professional coverage of meets in the United States and around the world. I go to this site mainly for the high school state meet results and random foreign national competitions. High school results are great because if you look at all the meets you will never be surprised by the swimmers having breakout freshmen years.

www.swimnews.com - Craig Lord runs this site. There’s a lot of cross over between this place and Swimming World, with the occasional interesting and unique piece written by Craig himself. This is the best source for Canadian national results. The great thing about Swimnews is that it has searchable world rankings for the calendar year in both LCM and SCM- a great resource.

www.hirsit.org/ofswimming - Don’t be intimidated if the first blog post you see is in Finnish. The writer of this blog, from what I can deduce, is a fanatical Finnish swimming fan. I admire him because he definitely spends more time than me scouring the internet for interesting stories to link to from his site. He also is really great at putting up some of the more obscure European and international results, particularly various European junior meets. Like Junior nationals in the US, these meet results will ensure that you won’t be surprised when Stefan Nystrand emerges as a world class sprinter.

www.omegatiming.com - I go here to watch a live scoreboard at meets I can’t watch live on tv. They usually do timing for big USA swimming meets or international
competitions.

Commentary:

www.timedfinals.com - I know I’ve linked to them before on this site. The strength of this site is the opinions and discussion it generates. They report on a lot of the same stories that other sites do, but they do it from a more laid back, blogger perspective. In my opinion, the best content on the site comes from Mike Gustafson, a former swimmer for Northwestern. In his column “The Swimmers Ear” he offers whimsical guides for how to successfully make it through a college taper and more heartfelt pieces about the best and worst parts of coaching.

www.collegeswimming.com - I love to read the forums here. There is some really terrible stuff, but also good. Arguments, like at most message boards, can devolve quickly into childish ranting. If you filter out all the children young and old, you will usually find some information that you haven’t read elsewhere. With the bad comes passionate fans of college swimming willing to stake their claims on one issue or another, and there are more than a few frequent posters who I could learn a thing or two from. Collegeswimming also does a great job of collecting college conference meet results and results from dual meets across the country.

www.d3swimming.com -Sort of a niche site. Collegeswimming does a great job covering Division 1 swimming, but falls short in the rest of collegiate swimming. D3swimming was founded by a few intrepid Kalamazoo college alums who wanted to create a hub for the D3 swimming scene. They succeeded, and the site is a great resource for people who want to keep up with the world of non-scholarship athletics. The clientele is smaller and more knowledgeable than at Collegeswimming and definitely is not limited to just D3 swimming.

This site doesn’t really fit into either of my categories. I know I might be a bit biased, but I think floswimming has pretty unique content to offer fans of the sport. The interviews conducted by Garrett with coaches and athletes offer more of that type of content than you can find anywhere else. At the same time, floswimming is home to a nascent blogging community. My hope is that this part of the site grows to be on par with Timedfinals. I won’t speak for the others but I know I have a ways to go. When people ask me what floswimming is, I tell them its like youtube merged with facebook for swimmers. That comparison doesn’t really do the site justice.

The most exciting part for me is that I feel like there is still a lot of content out there that I have yet to discover. Therefore, I’d like to turn to my readers. If, between the five of you, you could come up with a few sites I haven’t mentioned, please send them to me. I’ll post the best reader submissions in a future post and be sure to give you your due credit. I am also soliciting any swimming history related questions for a future mailbag post. I’ll do my best to find and answer for you, no matter how obscure. Next week I’ll be on vacation, so it may be two weeks until my next post. Until then, I hope this list helps you tap your inner swim nerd.