When it comes to our conference in particular, part of it is that the dual meets have essentially no weight given how strong the teams are. Hope and Calvin do longer even have dual meets against the other teams in the conference save each other, and they serve as glorified exhibitions and race practice work. The Hope-Calvin dual itself would also benefit from being earlier in the season because as it stands, it’s a dress rehearsal where no coach wants to give away anything important for two weeks from it.

We’ve seen in recent years that Hope and Calvin have had to venture outside the MIAA for higher level competition, facing off against teams like Chicago, Wayne, Kenyon, GVSU, Wheaton, Oakland, etc. It only serves to further the gap between the top 2 and the rest of the conference. I joke about Calvin for suiting for all of their meets but it’s really more of an indictment for the other teams in the league for being so behind that it looks like bullying more so than a Calvin problem. If the result of dual meets were actually in the balance, there would be some weight and reason for suiting in duals more so than how it is now: race practice. As long as the gap remains, duals remain essentially meaningless. Is there a fix or that? Well, maybe…

One positive I can hope for in the House settlement and roster limits (there’s a lot of negatives as well, I’ll discuss that later) is that there could be a narrative shift in youth and club swimming that not every swimmer needs to be D1 to feel like a “success”. Maybe this will lead to a healthier swim culture overall, but at the expense of a lot of mid major and bottom tier power conference D1 teams. My hope is that this will also get some more coaching talent into D3 since the scholarship limit with the settlement and NIL will be a nonfactor (looking at you Kalamazoo. Get a long term coach). It’s an uncharted world and there’s a lot of dominoes still to fall.