Dipping a toe into the advanced metric swimming pool

The trend in sports is clear: Better analysis leads to a clearer picture of the athlete.

Entire divisions of big-league sports franchises are devoted to deriving the most relevant information about players using some fairly complex statistical tactics. The trend is most prevalent in baseball, where the individual nature of the game lends itself to this kind of empirical scrutiny, and something like objective knowledge seems within reach.

Thus, on the diamond we bid farewell to old-school measurements such as batting average and RBI, while we try to embrace colorful acronyms such as WAR (wins above replacement) or VORP (value over replacement player).

Swimming, also a very individual pursuit, has so far been immune to this kind of advanced-math examination - which is fine be me. My general outlook is that the best numbers-based systems can be helpful in describing the full range of what an athlete has done, and thus can be useful as comparison . . . but also subject to misinterpretation.

My own biases aside, I have come around to a point of view which acknowledges that the new stats are fun. If nothing else, they're fuel for conversation, offering conflicting shards of insight toward high-minded discussions about whether, say, Kris Bryant or Daniel Murphy was more "valuable," whether Kyle Hendricks was a better pitcher than Max Scherzer.

Now, in swimming, the standard stat has always been time. It's great for comparison, and nothing I'm proposing should be viewed as a threat to its lofty spot in the sport.

Time - objective, elegant, concise.

And maybe a little boring.

I don't expect anyone outside Chlorine Nation to warmly welcome all these new swimming metrics I'm about to propose. But as we dive into another Illinois high school boys swimming season, hopefully they help us get a bit closer to the clearest possible picture - and give us something to talk about along the way.

For competitors:

SPRINT - Supremely Proud In Not Training. A simple diagnostic: Take your best 50 time and double it. If the resulting number is more than 5 seconds better than your best 100 time, you either need to practice harder or be steadfastly defiant about your uniquely absurd natural limitations.

LAME - Lactic Acid Meltdown Expectancy. This figure is intended to measure the disdain swimmers have about upcoming workouts. The value is calculated by taking the number of times one complains out loud about an upcoming practice, added to the times one utters a gripe to self. Low-level dread does not count, as it is a universal constant and thus background noise. A LAME of 5 or more needs immediate attention.

STUD - Super Tough Under Duress. This is a way of measuring your success over the course of a season, and it neatly removes the clutter of how fast you are relative to others. In your favorite race, compare your slowest time of the year to your fastest time of the year. If the gap between those two times is two-thirds of one percent (or more) of your best time, well, congratulations - You were a STUD, and don't let that faster kid tell you otherwise.

WUSS - Weakness Under Suspicious Setting. Keep a running tally throughout the season; for every time you miss a workout for a flimsy reason such as "not feeling 100 percent" or "cousin's friend is visiting," award yourself a -1. For each instance when you overcome the temptation to go easy on yourself in any way, award yourself a +1. The idea here is to end up with a strongly positive WUSS factor.

For coaches

LAGG - Lowest Average Go-Getter. A strategy to bring objectivity to the age-old concern of who on your team takes the longest to get in the pool at the start of practice. It's simple: First person in the water gets a 1, second one in gets a 2 and so on until everyone is in the tank. After the start of each practice, the numbers are updated and averaged, and then posted for all to see. Optional: The bottom five swimmers get shamed with post-workout chores (lane lines, etc).

WANT - Willingness Above Normal Teen. This is to help quantify the sheer hunger necessary for the highest level of achievement. Take the number of times a top swimmer genuinely exceeds expectations in practices or meets, and divide that by the number of practices or meets missed. Anybody that stays above 10, you've got a real leader on your hands.

LOL - Not to be confused with the conventional abbreviation, this stands for Lollygagging On Laneline. The accrued instances of any individual caught resting on the lane line between (or during) sets is observed. When any lane's LOL factor exceeds the threshhold established by the coach, that lane gets the disincentive of having to swim the rest of practice without any lane lines.

For parents

SLIM - Sustained Life Improvement Metric. A ratio measurement intended to objectively quantify the degree of physical fitness your child is achieving through swimming, without the intrusions of body fat measurement or blood tests. Just ask your swimmer, "How was practice today?" The number of words in the response is the numerator (a grunt or moan counts as 1 word). The denominator is the number of yards completed in that practice. The smaller your fraction, the healthier your swimmer is.

NERD - Not Entering Routine Discourse. The focus on practice and meets will naturally have a limiting effect on social activities for your child for these next 14 or so weeks, but it is important for him to stay engaged with land-based folks during this period. Keep track of how many times per week he declines to join a non-aquatic activity that normally would be appealing to him (note: yes, even skipping an online gaming session qualifies). Take this number and multiply it by the number of times per week you catch yourself saying, "His hair is an outright disaster." Anything above 15 indicates the need for non-aquatic social bonding, such as cheering for the school basketball team.

FREAQ - Family Ready to Excel in Aquatics. For moms and dads with more than one swimmer, this will help measure the satisfaction level of your family's overall participation, irrespective of gender. Find a sample one-week period in which each swimmer has at least one meet. Award yourself 1 point for every best time achieved and 1 more for each genuine sibling-to-sibling swimming compliment observed. Divide this value by the sum of event disqualifications plus swimming-based anxiety dreams you have had in the same one-week period.

If you result with a value greater than zero, congratulations - you are doing it right.

agabriel@dailyherald.com