Lizzy Johnson Commits to Florida State for 2028: 23.17 Seconds and a Relay Equation

One Touch at Winter Classic In the 50-yard freestyle at the December RAFC Winter Classic, the electronic scoreboard stopped at 23.17 seconds. Most of the stands recorded a single line: the Windermere girl won a sprint event. In Tallahassee, the coaching staff read something else — a link that could slot into two freestyle relays, and a clock long enough to plan through 2028. Lizzy Johnson, a junior at Windermere High School in Florida, has announced her verbal commitment to swim and study at Florida State University. In a social media post she thanked Goller, coach Ali, Cynthia, her family and friends, along with coaches Kyle, Ben and Neal — the people who, in her own words, gave her the chance to turn a lifelong dream into reality. “I am so beyond excited for what the future holds and cannot wait to get started in Tally. GO NOLES!” A verbal commitment is not a signature. It is a spoken agreement between a 16- or 17-year-old athlete and a college program, existing before any binding document. In American college swimming, the gap between promise and signature can stretch two years. Across those two years, shoulders, wrists, motivation, coaching positions and scholarship money can all shift direction. There are discoveries that do not come from luck, but from being willing to read the movements the crowd skips past. Johnson's announcement is not one of them. It belongs to the category of information that gets read too fast. Context: One Seat in the Sprint Group Johnson swims year-round for Lakers Swimming and competes for Windermere High School. She belongs to the recruiting class of 2028 — the group that will set foot on the Tallahassee campus in the fall of 2028, after high school graduation. That is a distant marker. The distance itself turns this announcement from a recruiting note into a probability problem. Her state-level record draws a fairly clear path. As a freshman at the FHSAA Class 4A State Championships she placed 4th in the 50-yard freestyle in 23.74 and 11th in the 200-yard freestyle in 1:50.23. As a sophomore at the same meet she moved to the 200-yard freestyle and took 6th in 1:49.90, while placing 4th in the 100-yard freestyle in 51.13. The event switch at the state meet is the most telling detail across those two lines of data. A 50-yard swimmer moving to the 100 and 200 at the biggest meet of the school year is not someone optimizing individual results. That is someone being tested for a relay gap — where a team needs four strong 100 legs more than one excellent 50. Most of her personal bests were set in December at the RAFC Winter Classic. She won the 50-yard freestyle, finished runner-up in the 200-yard freestyle and the 100-yard individual medley, placed 9th in the 100-yard freestyle and 50-yard breaststroke, 11th in the 50-yard butterfly and 17th in the 100-yard butterfly. Her personal marks at that meet included 23.17 in the 50 free, 1:49.61 in the 200 free, 55.83 in the 100 fly and 57.38 in the 100 IM. A month earlier, at Almost Turkey, she set lifetime bests in the 500-yard freestyle and the 200-yard butterfly. One autumn and one winter. One event switch. A spread of personal bests across four different events. Read the results page and you see a freestyle swimmer with speed. Read closer and you see an athlete widening her surface area in the water — butterfly, breaststroke, IM, distance free. A 55.83 in the 100-yard butterfly in the same season as a 23.17 in the 50-yard freestyle is an unnatural pairing. In purely speed-based sprint groups, the 100 fly usually trails several seconds behind what the 50 free suggests. Here the gap is narrower than expected. What does that mean for a program like Florida State? The sprint group, based on the current roster, may still include juniors Maryn McDade (22.20/49.04 last season) and Mary Leigh Hardman (49.51/1:48.17), along with sophomores Antonina Biegajlo (22.87/50.94) and Ioana Stirbu (49.03/1:44.97). The word “may” is not empty caution here. A 2028 roster is written on athletes who could have left the team, transferred or exhausted eligibility before Johnson touches her first lane of water. Reading the 50 Freestyle Like a Track Event There is a technical reason I always read short-course sprint events through the eyes of someone who has watched the track. Fifty yards equals 45.72 metres. That sits close to the 60 metres of track — short enough for reaction time to carry serious weight, long enough that top speed must be sustained through an underwater segment and a turn. Over 60 metres, a track athlete loses roughly 0.15 seconds to reaction. In swimming, reaction time off the blocks typically lands between 0.6 and 0.75 seconds. Across a 23-second race, that is close to 3 percent of total time. The number never appears on a results sheet, but it appears in every race. Then there is the underwater segment. The best sprint swimmers in the world travel 10 to 15 metres underwater after the start, and that stretch is considerably faster than swimming at the surface. The difference between an athlete who goes 8 metres underwater and one who goes 13 metres can reach four or five tenths of a second at this distance. No results sheet tells us where Johnson sits between those two marks. This is why I never treat 23.17 as an endpoint. It is a point on a curve, and most of the curve lives in things that never reach the scoreboard: underwater depth, entry angle, kick frequency over the first 10 metres after surfacing, and the ability to hold stroke mechanics through the shift from the second breath to the third. A little background on how I work. In 2026, at the start of my career at a sports newsroom, I was handed swimming because nobody else wanted the beat. I learned the trade by sitting in the stands, writing every touch into a notebook, then comparing it against the electronic results. Nine times out of ten the number on the board did not match what I thought I had seen — or more precisely, the number was right and the story I believed I had watched was not. The Real Value Is in the Relays, Not the Individual Sheet The 400-yard freestyle relay is four 100-yard legs. If you combine the four best current marks in the group — Stirbu 49.03, McDade 49.04, Hardman 49.51, Johnson 51.13 — the raw total is 198.71 seconds, or 1:38.71. In a relay, three of the four legs are flying starts, each typically saving 0.4 to 0.7 seconds over a flat start. Adding that saving puts the figure in the 1:36.7 to 1:37.3 range. Three of those four legs do not belong to Johnson. This is the point most recruiting notes skip. A sprint commitment is not paid to fill the fastest leg. It is paid to make the third or fourth leg good enough, and to force others to compete for a spot. A sprint scholarship does not buy absolute speed. It buys depth. In the 200-yard freestyle relay, four 50-yard legs, the picture tilts the other way. McDade at 22.20 and Biegajlo at 22.87 are strong opening legs. Johnson at 23.17 is a sensible third leg. The fourth leg, still open, is where a good season can make a difference. Four legs of 22.20 plus 22.87 plus 23.17 plus roughly 23.5 total 91.74 seconds, or 1:31.74 from a flat start. With three flying takeovers, the real figure lands somewhere between 1:30.4 and 1:31.0. Roughly 0.97 seconds is saved by Johnson being about 1 percent faster than an average 50-yard leg in the group. At a conference meet, 0.97 seconds is the distance between a championship final and a consolation heat. Data does not judge, but it points me to the questions others forget. The question here is not how fast Johnson is. The question is how many seconds she saves for the three swimmers beside her. Another check I always apply when reading young swimming profiles: conversion to long course. Not because long course matters more in American college swimming — the competitive system runs short-course yards — but because it separates raw speed from turn and underwater mechanics. Rough conversion models, with significant error bars, place 23.17 in the 50-yard freestyle somewhere between 25.7 and 26.2 seconds over 50 metres. A 51.13 in the 100-yard freestyle lands between 58.3 and 59.0 over 100 metres. A 1:49.61 in the 200-yard freestyle translates to roughly 2:03.5 to 2:04.5 over 200 metres. These are estimates, dependent on underwater distance off the start, turn count and the quality of each athlete's turns. But they are enough to reveal something: the gap between Johnson and the national leaders in long course is wider than the gap in short course. Most of that gap sits in technique, not in strength. And technique can be taught. The Missing Data This is where I have to be blunt about the limits of what is on the table. A results sheet tells us outcomes. It does not tell us reaction time off the blocks. It does not tell us how many metres she travels underwater off the start. It does not tell us kick speed over the final 15 metres, when lactic acid begins choking stroke mechanics. And it especially does not tell us the shape of the improvement curve. The shape of the curve is what forecasts the future. From freshman to sophomore year, her state-meet 200-yard freestyle moved from 1:50.23 to 1:49.90, or 0.33 seconds. In the 50-yard freestyle, from 23.74 to 23.17 over the same window, or 0.57 seconds. But 23.74 came in the freshman state final, a swim that was not her fastest of the season. And 23.17 came at a winter meet after heavy training. Comparing the two numbers without knowing the training context is a common mistake, even among veterans of the beat. I once mispronounced a player's name at a World Cup, and rebuilt my entire way of watching a match from it. The lesson was not about getting a name right. It was that I had trusted memory instead of trusting a system. In swimming, the same temptation shows up in a different place: trusting the time instead of trusting the conditions that produced it. A 23.17 swum in December, at a mid-season meet, in short-course yards, after months of base training, has a different predictive value than a 23.17 swum in March, after a taper, at a scored championship. Same number. Two stories. Only one of them says something about the 2028 season. The Contrarian Angle: The Recruiting Market Is Mispricing When the pandemic froze the world, the transfer market became a place where numbers stopped meaning anything. I spent months tracking how clubs responded to empty stadiums — how they lost timing cues, how high-pressing teams dropped in efficiency because there was no crowd noise to measure rhythm against. What I learned was not that numbers are meaningless. What I learned is that a number only means something when you know the environment that produced it. American college swimming recruiting sits in a similar state, except nobody calls it that. A verbal commitment at 16 is a contract priced on data from an unfinished body. The class of 2028 will be ranked on swim results over the next two years. In those two years, an athlete can grow 8 centimetres, completely restructure her musculature, or lose a season to a shoulder injury. An injury is where every analytical model has to bow its head — and also where I have learned the most. No results sheet predicts it. No improvement curve is immune to it. The conventional argument sounds reasonable: commit early to hold a spot, to acclimatise to the program, to let coaches plan four years out. I do not dispute that logic. For an athlete at 23.17 and 51.13, locking in early with an ACC school is a sound decision from a personal risk-management standpoint. But there is a blind spot. Recruiting rankings rank numbers, not curves. Two athletes with identical 23.17s in the 50-yard freestyle can have completely different futures: one reached that mark through three years of steady 0.2-second annual gains, the other hit it in a single breakout and then plateaued. The ranking gives them one line. A forecasting model has to give them two. There is a larger variable that recruiting notes barely touch: transfers. The transfer window in college swimming has changed how teams build sprint groups. A scholarship spent on a 17-year-old is a scholarship not spent on a 20-year-old who has already proven she can swim four rounds in one evening. When Johnson arrives in Tallahassee, the sprint group she joins will not be the sprint group she is looking at today. I have seen this too many times to put full faith in a roster published two years in advance. The second blind spot is event versatility. Johnson swims the 100 fly, the 100 IM, the 200 fly, the 500 free. On paper that is an asset. At a conference meet it can be a problem. Conference points come from athletes with two events strong enough to reach the A final in both. An athlete with five events at a good level but none at an excellent level will swim a lot of rounds and score very few points. Here is the paradox I want readers to see: versatility opens long-term opportunity, but it also delays specialisation. For a 17-year-old swimmer, delaying specialisation is almost always the right call. For a program that needs points at a February conference meet, it is a gamble. So what does this commitment say about Florida State? It says the staff is building a floor, not a star. McDade at 22.20 and Stirbu at 49.03 are legs that can carry points. Johnson at 23.17 and 51.13 is a leg that can hold that level for three or four years. For an ACC swimming program, a stable floor is worth more than one individual's peak season. I am not predicting what she will swim in 2028. I am pointing out that nobody has enough data to make that prediction today, including the people writing the rankings. What Matters Is Not on the Scoreboard When the next season begins, there is one metric I will track on Johnson that appears on no results sheet: the gap between her 50-yard freestyle and her 100-yard freestyle. If that gap narrows, she is converting from a speed swimmer into a speed-endurance swimmer — the profile every college program needs for the 400-yard relay. If that gap widens, she is becoming a 50-yard specialist, and her role in Tallahassee will have to be rewritten. It would be easy to read this announcement as an ending. A 17-year-old girl, a university, one line reading GO NOLES. But this is the opening of the phase in which old data depreciates fastest — the phase where body, technique and training environment all change at once. What happens to a 23.17 swimmer when she gets a coach who specialises in underwater mechanics, a strength facility, and three years in front of her? That is a question I would rather keep than answer.