Swim to College is built and maintained by Ivan Tsai. Ivan has spent more than fifteen years building large-scale data pipelines, turning messy public information into structured, verifiable datasets for some of the largest technology companies in Asia. He also runs a competitive swim club and is the father of three daughters. One of them is a competitive swimmer. Another competes in artistic swimming at the highest international level — she has won world junior and World Cup titles, and is still training and competing today. For this family, college recruiting is not an abstract market; it is a real decision, with real times, real costs and real deadlines.
When a swim family starts looking at colleges, the questions are simple: how fast is fast enough for this team, what does it really cost, and what does an international applicant actually need? The answers are scattered across hundreds of athletic sites, government databases and word of mouth — and much of what circulates is guesswork.
This site takes a different approach. Instead of opinions, it shows the actual best times of current rosters, drawn from 9.5 million race results, alongside cost and admissions data from official sources. Every admissions field carries a source status. When a school hasn't disclosed something, the page says "Not disclosed" — it is never silently converted into a zero or a guess.
Time standards are computed from each current swimmer's best time over the last four seasons, aggregated by team and event. Admissions and cost figures come from the U.S. College Scorecard and from each school's official pages, with the original source snippet preserved so you can check it yourself. The full methodology is documented on our data page.
Questions or corrections: hello@swimtocollege.com
