Aubrial MacKay Commits to Texas for 2028-29: The Short-Course Speed Is There, the Long-Course Test Awaits

"See you in '28."

The final line of Aubrial MacKay's post is short enough that a quick scroll would erase it. Above it sit four hundred words: thanks to her mother, whom she calls her best friend and her model of sacrifice; to her father, who believed in her more than she believed in herself; to her grandparents, who drove her to and from practice more times than anyone counted; to her four younger brothers; and to five coaches. Below it sit two capitalised words, HOOK EM, and three symbols: a white heart, an orange, a smile.

I read that post at 1:47 a.m. Nagoya time, with nothing outside but a freight train rolling toward the port. In 2026 I screamed myself breathless in a commentary booth in Kazan when Kylian Mbappe hit 37 km/h. Three years later I lost my voice at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium over Karsten Warholm's 45.94 seconds. Tonight I sat in front of a small screen, rewinding a women's 200 butterfly tape, and realised I was doing the same thing I have always done: measuring a human being by the distance between two wall touches.

Aubrial MacKay, from Owosso, Michigan, has announced her verbal commitment to the University of Texas for the 2028-29 season. She swims year-round for OLY Swimming in Ortonville, Michigan, under five coaches: Adam, Chase, Carol, Brandt and Chad. On the Way Too Early list for the high school class of 2028, she was placed as an Honorable Mention, a small footnote at the bottom of the page. Austin is two years away. Two years is a strange length of time in this sport: long enough for a sixteen-year-old to become someone else, and long enough for her to stay exactly where she is.

Context: one promise, two pool formats and one brutal conference

Before dissecting the data, the mechanics need spelling out, because many readers are meeting the American college athletics recruiting system for the first time. A verbal commitment is not a binding contract. It is a promise between two parties, formalised in November of senior year, and in the era of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness rights, a promise made at sixteen is an option rather than an outcome.

The more important detail is where MacKay is going. Texas is no longer the Texas of the Big 12. The Longhorns have moved into the SEC, the most brutal conference in American college swimming, where every final slot must be clawed away from Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas A&M, LSU, Alabama and Auburn. A C final at SECs means 17th to 24th. A B final means 9th to 16th, and at NCAAs only sixteen places score. The line between scoring at SECs and scoring at NCAAs sits exactly between those two rows.

There is also a small detail about the source worth noting. This commitment was published through SwimSwam's college recruiting channel, which is sponsored by Fitter and Faster Swim Camps, a provider of year-round swim camps across the United States and Canada. It is one strand in the North American swimming ecosystem: camps sponsor the recruiting feed, the recruiting feed sustains attention on young athletes, and that attention raises their market value. Nothing underhanded, but readers should know what they are reading.

Technically, MacKay is regarded as a versatile talent. She holds national qualifying cuts in the 50 and 100 backstroke and the 100 and 200 butterfly. She has also met Summer Juniors standards in the 100 freestyle, 200 backstroke, 50 butterfly and 200 individual medley. Six event groups, three different stroke mechanics, two different pool formats. That is a strength, and it is also a problem I will return to at the end.

The data: what is actually inside the numbers

The first anchor is Winter Juniors East 2026. She finaled in the 100 backstroke and finished 16th in 53.69; she was 13th in the 100 butterfly in 53.33; and 10th in the 200 butterfly in 1:57.76. All three were personal bests. Read those three results side by side and a pattern emerges: as the distance grows, her placing rises with it.

Two months later, at the OLY Open, she took down three more personal bests: the 100 freestyle down to 52.29, the 200 backstroke down to 1:57.33, and the 100 butterfly down to 53.09. A 0-0 match contains 47 details, if you are still enough to see them. So does this session: three lines of results, and behind them three months of training that nobody streamed.

Then came the NCSA Spring Championships: 23.12 in the 50 freestyle, 25.14 in the 50 backstroke, 1:56.82 in the 200 butterfly and 2:01.37 in the 200 individual medley. Long-course season opened at Indy Sectionals, where she produced personal bests across the board: 58.21 in the 100 freestyle, 28.61 in the 50 backstroke, 1:02.98 in the 100 backstroke, 1:00.04 in the 100 butterfly, 2:14.15 in the 200 butterfly and 2:20.77 in the 200 individual medley. She closed the season with 26.67 / 57.65 / 2:06.47 across the 50, 100 and 200 freestyle, 2:21.18 in the 200 backstroke and 27.77 in the 50 butterfly.

That list is long, and read purely to establish how fast she is, it means nothing. The useful work is to check what her speed is built from.

Across seventeen years of watching swimming, I have learned one thing: most American short-course times are inflated by three things that do not exist outside a 25-yard pool, namely the start, the underwater segment after every turn, and turn technique. A swimmer can go 52 seconds in the short-course 100 butterfly and only 55 seconds in a 50-metre pool. That gap is noise in the recruiting market, and it is why a considerable number of American athletic scholarships are handed to the wrong people.

So I keep using one test when assessing a young swimmer: convert the long-course times back to short course using the reference factor for each event, then set them beside the actual short-course times. These factors are only estimates, no formula is exact, and the margin of error between events can reach a few percentage points, but it is enough to expose a swimmer who lives on turn technique rather than on their own arms.

The result made me sit up straight.

In the 100 butterfly, the reference factor sits around 0.885. Multiply 1:00.04 by that and you get roughly 53.1. Her actual short-course best is 53.09. Almost an exact match.

In the 100 backstroke the factor is around 0.855. From 1:02.98 you get roughly 53.8. Her actual short-course best is 53.69. A tenth of a second apart.

In the 200 backstroke the factor is around 0.83. From 2:21.18 you get roughly 1:57.2. Her actual short-course best is 1:57.33.

In the 200 individual medley the factor is around 0.86. From 2:20.77 you get roughly 2:01.06. Her actual short-course best is 2:01.37.

In the 200 butterfly the factor is around 0.875. From 2:14.15 you get roughly 1:57.4. Her actual short-course best is 1:56.82, about half a second faster.

Four of five events line up almost perfectly. This is the most valuable data in Aubrial MacKay's entire profile, and it appears in no recruiting ranking anywhere.

Put another way: her speed does not come from the corners. It comes from her arms, her breathing rhythm, her speed endurance. A sixteen-year-old whose long-course and short-course times align is a sixteen-year-old with a foundation that transfers to the international stage, where long course is the only standard that counts.

In the 200 butterfly, her short-course time is about half a second quicker than the long-course conversion implies. Half a second over 200 metres is not a chasm, but it does point to unexplored ground: long-course endurance in the very event in which she ranks highest nationally.

With her current times, according to the source's analysis, she would score a B final in the 200 butterfly and C finals in the 100 butterfly and 100 backstroke at SECs. Translated plainly: the 200 butterfly is her goldmine, because a B final at SECs equates to a scoring position at NCAAs if the form holds. The other two events place her in the 17-to-24 band, meaning points for Texas at SECs but not yet the NCAA scoring threshold.

She is also described as not far off in the 200 backstroke, 200 individual medley and 400 individual medley. This is where I pause, because I rewound her results four times and found no 400 individual medley time at all. In the entire published data set there is a 200 individual medley, a 200 backstroke, a 200 butterfly, and no 400 individual medley. A gap in the data is not proof of a gap in ability, but it is the biggest question Texas will have to answer over the next two years. If MacKay can swim the 400 individual medley at a level comparable to her 200, she becomes a four-event swimmer at SEC level. If she cannot, she is a butterfly specialist with two side events.

Relays are a separate story. 52.29 in the 100 freestyle and 23.12 in the 50 freestyle are marks good enough to be considered for freestyle relay legs. By the rule of thumb, a relay leg with a flying start is usually 0.7 to 1 second faster than a flat start over 100, so 52.29 could become roughly 51.3 to 51.6 on a leg. That is competitive in SEC prelims but not enough to guarantee a place on a scoring NCAA relay. Texas will not recruit her for relay legs. Texas recruits her for the butterfly.

There is one more layer that few notice. MacKay belongs to the recruiting class of 2028, which means she arrives in Austin in the autumn of 2028, immediately after the Los Angeles Olympics close that same summer. The entire American swimming system will enter a post-home-Games restructuring cycle: one generation retires, another is pushed forward, scholarships are reallocated, and Olympic relay slots open up to younger swimmers. The class of 2028 will be the first to breathe that air from the day it enrols.

Each lane is a question, and I am the kind of person who loves chasing answers. There is no answer here yet. There is only a girl in Owosso, Michigan, who has just written a short line into the future.

The contrarian angle: versatility is a recruiting gift and a coaching curse

This is where I push back against the very excitement this news creates.

MacKay holds national cuts in four events and Summer Juniors standards in four others, six event groups spanning 50 to 200 metres, butterfly to backstroke to medley. For a head coach, that is a card that can be played in almost any slot on a scoring lineup. For the athlete herself, it is a time-allocation problem with no elegant solution.

In American college swimming, the gap between a C final and an A final in the 100 butterfly is often only about one to one and a half seconds. Closing a second and a half in the 100 butterfly takes roughly two years of near-total focus on one mechanical cluster: the entry angle of the hand, the depth of the dolphin kick, the breath at 35 metres, the stroke rate over the last 15 metres. Every hour given to the 50 backstroke or the 200 individual medley is an hour not given to those things. The greatest college careers I have watched were not built on six events each getting three tenths of a second faster; they were built on one event getting a second and a half faster.

At sixteen, nobody is forced to choose. Most of her speed is still coming from technique that can improve in all six events, and choosing early can be a mistake. But by the autumn of 2028, when she stands in the Texas pool and a coach asks which event she wants to attack at SECs, the answer will have to be one event.

And the rankings need saying plainly. An Honorable Mention on a Way Too Early list for the class of 2028 is worth close to nothing. Those lists are compiled at a point when most of the swimmers on them have not finished puberty, and they turn over completely every summer. What actually carries value is not the ranking position but the slope of the improvement curve. MacKay's slope is formidable: 0.24 seconds in the 100 butterfly across two months; nearly a second in the 200 butterfly across roughly three months; and a sweep of personal bests on the shift to long course. If that slope holds for two years, she arrives in Austin as a different swimmer. If it flattens, which happens to most girls at this age and is biology rather than failure, then every projection made today becomes a footnote.

I do not measure Mbappe's speed with radar; I measure it by the fear of the defenders. In swimming, the equivalent measure is the reaction of the next lane over the final 25 metres. And at sixteen, nobody has enough data to measure that yet.

Takeaway

A verbal commitment at sixteen is a letter to your future self, and the sender is always the most optimistic person in the room. Aubrial MacKay wrote that letter, sealed it, and marked the delivery date: autumn 2028, Austin, Texas.

What I want to know is not how fast she will swim. What I want to know is whether, on some February morning in 2028, stepping out of lane four after a session so hard she cannot speak in full sentences, she will still remember what she promised herself in that post.

I do not write to conclude; I write to open small doors in your head. And this door opens onto Owosso, Michigan, where there is a 25-yard pool and a girl with two years left to answer.