Taking Inventory: How Arizona swimming is trying beneath coach Augie Busch

The offseason is right here, with all of Arizona’s sports activities achieved for 2021-22 and the 2022-23 campaigns nonetheless somewhat methods away.

Which makes this a good time to step again and see how the entire Wildcats’ applications are doing.

Over the subsequent few weeks we’ll check out every of the UA’s 19 males’s and ladies’s applications to see what form they’re in and what prospects they’ve for the close to future. We’ll break down every crew and consider how it’s performing beneath its present teaching workers, trying on the state of this system earlier than he/she arrived and evaluating it to now whereas additionally this season and past.

Next up: Augie Busch’s swimming and diving crew.

How it appeared earlier than

Swim and dive has been considered one of high applications in UA historical past, with a to of particular person and relay titles at each the convention and NCAA degree. The males’s and ladies’s squads each gained the nationwide championship in 2008.

But since Frank Busch moved on in 2011 the outcomes have dipped. The hope was that his son, Augie, would assist carry again that outdated fireplace when he was employed in July 2017. He had been an assistant with the UA from 2003-11, then was the Houston girls’s coach for 2 seasons and adopted that with 4 seasons in command of each males’s and ladies’s groups at Virginia, the place he twice led the Cavalier girls to a fifth-place end on the NCAA meet.

Where issues stand now

The 2021-22 season noticed each UA squads end fifth on the Pac-12 meet, whereas on the NCAA championships the Arizona males scored 79 factors to land 17^th general and the ladies received 19^th place with 52.5 factors.

Delaney Schnell gained each Pac-12 diving titles for the second season in a row, finishing a whirlwind 12 months that included her claiming a silver medal on the Tokyo Olympics. Her efforts helped UA diving coach Dwight Dumais earned Pac-12 Diving Coach of the Year honors.

The high males’s swimmer was Brooks Fail, who earned All-America standing in three occasions. Like Schnell, he was a senior.

One huge query

Can this program get again to an elite degree? Like many Olympic sports activities on the faculty degree, the variety of scholarships obtainable is miniscule. Men’s squads get simply 9.9 scholarships to divvy up amongst greater than 30 swimmers and divers, whereas the ladies’s crew will get 14.

That makes it exhausting to draw high expertise in the event you can’t assure their schooling is paid for, but Arizona has achieved it up to now.

Per SwimCloud.com, the highest incoming recruit for the ladies’s crew is Julia Wozniak, who’s ranked No. 118 general and is taken into account the 4th-best swimmer from Texas. On the lads’s facet it’s Hayden Ghufran, who’s ranked No. 142 general and No. 12 from California.