Mac Ratzlaff, a state qualifier at Indian Creek his freshman year before transferring to Franklin, is the most prominent local example of an elite swimmer who changed teams during his high school career.
Daily Journal file photo
Mac and Bella Ratzlaff were both state qualifiers at Indian Creek in 2018, when they were a freshman and sophomore, respectively. Big things appeared to be on the horizon for both at the time, and indeed they were.
They just didn’t happen with the Braves.
The Ratzlaffs transferred to Franklin just before the 2018-19 school year, deciding that losing a season of high school eligibility was worth the overall payoff of practicing next to a stronger talent pool at practice every day — not just with the Grizzly Cubs but also year-round with the Franklin Regional Swim Team.
As it turned out, it was. Bella scored in both of her individual events at the 2020 state meet, helping Franklin’s girls to a third-place team finish. As a senior in 2021, Mac was the state runner-up in the 200-yard freestyle and fourth in the 100 butterfly while also medaling on a pair of relays for the fourth-place Grizzly Cubs.
“For me and my family, we sat down and weighed the pros and cons,” said Mac Ratzlaff, who is now entering his sophomore season at the University of South Carolina. “Obviously, the pros turned out to be far greater than the cons. It was a chance, for sure, but it was definitely one worth taking.”
The quantity of swim transfers is not high; just 66 boys and girls switched schools and pools for the 2021-22 school year in Indiana, according to the IHSAA, compared with 681 transfers in basketball, 508 in football and more than 200 each in soccer, track and field and volleyball. The only sports with fewer transfers were golf, gymnastics and Unified sports.
Quality, though, is a very different story. While mid-level athletes in other sports will often switch schools in an effort to find more playing time, the few swimmers that do transfer are almost always difference-makers who initially sought out a more competitive club setting and then wound up gravitating to a new high school as a result.
Recent history offers several examples of high-level transfers. At the 2015 state finals, freshmen Drew Kibler and Andrew Couchon swam for North Central; two years later, both were juniors leading Carmel to a state championship. Jack Franzman was a Brownsburg freshman in 2015 but swam his final three seasons at Zionsville. All three were big point scorers at state — Kibler and Franzman each won multiple individiual titles — and Kibler was a member of the U.S. Olympic team in 2021.
Mac Ratzlaff was the most notable transfer to or from a Johnson County school, but he hasn’t been the only one. Brady Campbell, who represented Whiteland at the state meet in 2021, made a similar choice. Having swam club almost entirely for FRST since he was 7 years old, he transferred to Franklin a year ago. Campbell was ineligible to compete for the Grizzly Cubs as a junior but will be a part of the team this winter. Albert Nusawardhana, Grace Fisher and Lucy Ho were also recent local mid-career transfers who became at least relay contributors at a state level.
Part of the reason that elite swimmers are so willing to sacrifice a season is the unique relationship that exists in Indiana between high school and club swimming. The IHSAA won’t allow, for example, an AAU basketball coach or travel softball coach to head up a high school varsity team — but in individual sports such as swimming or golf, nothing prohibits that crossover.
According to IHSAA assistant commissioner Kerrie Rosati, who oversees swimming and diving competition statewide, the marriage makes it so that athletes and coaches alike don’t have to decide between a school team and a club; in other states that don’t permit such a blend, the top swimmers and coaches often just stick with club teams and opt not to participate at the high school level.
With an allowance to compete in two club meets during the winter, the best swimmers in Indiana can still be a part of their school teams without missing out on major in-season club invitationals, such as the Speedo Winter Junior National Championships in December. The result is that Indiana — widely regarded as one of the top swimming states either way — retains almost all of its best performers and puts on perhaps the most competitive and electric high school state meets in the country every February.
“I think that helps our student-athletes not have to pick and choose,” Rosati said of the current rules. “Swimming is very talented in this state, and we would not want to do that to the student-athletes.”
One unintended side effect of that school-club marriage, though, is that the high schools tied to the top clubs often end up attracting more top swimmers. Carmel Swim Club, Fishers Area Swimming Tigers, Zionsville Swim Club and Franklin Regional Swim Team were all ranked among the nation’s top 100 by USA Swimming last year; it’s not really a coincidence that the high school teams in those cities have also racked up numerous top-five state finishes the last few seasons.
Star athletes gravitating to the most successful high school programs is hardly exclusive to swimming; Center Grove football, for example, has profited from its fair share of top-tier move-ins in recent years. But a football season lasts just three or four months, while swimmers can conceivably train with the same coach for the entire year. The benefits to an established or aspiring star are somewhat magnified as a result.
“It’s a cheat code,” Franklin and FRST coach Zach DeWitt said. “It is the quickest way to level up and surround yourself with people with common goals and common missions, and you’ll find yourself capable of that. If they think that you’re an average of your five best friends, do the math … if you’re at Carmel and you’re surrounded by like people, and they’re trying to win national titles or state titles, that’s who you’re going to become.”
And while some of the swimmers on those high-level teams aren’t attending their natural geographic high schools, most who make the choice to match with whatever club they’ve been swimming with do so before ninth grade. By switching early, they can usually avoid the “past link” scrutiny that comes with transferring later on. (They also don’t count toward the IHSAA’s transfer numbers.)
Others, though, have made the move during their high school careers — and most of them, the Ratzlaffs and Campbell included, have had to give up a season of competition as a result. That’s usually a trade-off that they’re happy to make because of the benefits they can reap from their club teams across the entire calendar.
“I can’t speak on the school piece; we’re strictly speaking in an athletic sense,” DeWitt said. “But I think that somebody’s like, ‘Well, I still get to be a part of the team. I get the training environment, I get the culture; I just don’t get to score.’ Really, one meet is what it boils down to — either sectionals or state. So they ask themselves, ‘Is state or sectionals worth forgoing all that other stuff?’
“You make a decision and you have repercussions, and some people are willing to live with those and some of them aren’t.”
