Methodology

A mythical team competition is one that happens without competition happening in the same pool, taking the times from the conference meets from around the world and scoring them as a combined meet to find the best female, male and combined International School teams in the world. 

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These rankings compare:

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• Meets: Multi-National Conference Championships with only International Schools attending

• 14 years and older when classified by age (intended to be in high school)

• Finals swims (not preliminary rounds)

• 3 Individual Event Limit

• 1 Relay per school

• Scored to 16th place in Invitational Scoring (20,17,16,15,14,13,12,11,9,7,6,5,4,3,2,1) 

  • Double for relays

• Combined team score must have female and male scorers

• LCM times are converted using team unify's formula found here.

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There are numerous complications with doing this. The bulk of these issues comes from the lack of standard events and entry expectations. The event list isn't unified throughout, with many leagues offering 50 meter events, some offering 200's of the strokes along with the 400 and even sometimes the 800 free. Relays are another place of disparity with some leagues offering just 2 or 3 of the 4 relays that others compete in. The entry strategy in each league are of course guided by what events are offered as are the number of allowed event entries and even the length of the meet. Each of these differences caused decisions to be made. In the end, every league I could find offered the following individual events: 50, 100 and 200 Free, 100 Breast, 100 Back, 100 Fly and 200 IM. For Relays, all but one league offered the 200 Free and Medley Relays (IASAS doesn't offer the 200 Medley Relay). I took one free and one medley relay that had the most number of leagues that offered each. These made up the events that I used for team scores. In the future other event rankings will be added, though not used as part of the team scores unless additional leagues offer the same events.

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Finally, the last complication is that the rankings only include conference championship meet results that consisted of International Schools from more than one country. International Schools in most places have multiple opportunities to compete, some against other International Schools and in some meets against club swimmers. By restricting the competition to just International School Conference Championships I felt it was looking at like for like. This does, however, exclude some excellent times done at other meets and even schools that either don't belong to a conference or don't compete at a league conference meet that contains other nation's schools (many schools in Japan for instance).