Swimming

Winter Juniors East Champion Jake Wang Commits to Yale for 2024

December 30, 2023

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High school senior Jake Wang from suburban Philadelphia has verbally committed to swim for Yale University in fall 2024. Yang, who committed earlier in the fall, is the 2023 Winter Juniors East Champion in the 100 yard breaststroke.

Wang trains with the Suburban Seahawks Club in Philadelphia’s western suburbs – the same program that produced another elite breaststroker, Olympic gold medalist Brendan Hansen. He attends Conestoga High School, which finished 3rd at last season’s Pennsylvania High School State Championship meet.

He was the high scorer for that 3rd-place effort, winning state titles in the 100 breaststroke (53.92) and 200 IM (1:46.94) in the spring. That 100 breaststroke title was his second-straight title in that event.

He’s improved even further since then, winning a bunch of big titles in the 100 breaststroke – including the 100 yard breast at Winter Juniors East a few weeks ago (52.97), the 100 meter breast at the NCSA Summer Championships in July (1:02.88), and the Middle Atlantic Senior Championship in the 100 yard breast in March (54.31).

Best Times in Yards:

100 breast – 52.97
200 breast – 2:00.26
50 free – 19.93
100 free – 43.39
200 free – 1:37.89
200 IM – 1:46.51

While Yang’s 200 isn’t to the level of his 100, he brings more than just breaststroke to the Bulldogs next season. Besides having a 100 breaststroke time that’s already faster than Yale’s best this season (freshman Charlie Egeland has been 53.21), he also is a 19.9/43.3 sprint freestyler. Only one Yale swimmer has been sub-20 in the 50 free this season (Deny Nankov, 19.76), and only one Yale swimmer has been under 44.4 in the 100 free this season (Nankov, again, at 42.85).

So besides being a projected 70+ individual point scorer as a freshman, he could immediately contribute to all five Yale relays in a big way – to the point that, thanks to Egeland’s presence, the best option for Yale points-wise might be to not use him on one of the medley relays, in spite of being so good in breaststroke.

Yale finished 3rd at the 2023 Ivy League Championships with 1,052 points. That put them 381.5 points behind Princeton and 493 points behind Harvard.

A big and power-packed high school class of 2023 should help Yale begin to close that gap. Wang, along with another highly-ranked Mid-Atlantic swimmer Elliot Lee, are part of a smaller Yale class of 2024, but those two classes together represent a wave of progress for the Bulldogs, who haven’t finished higher than 3rd at the Ivy League Championships since winning the 1972 title.

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