THE IVY LEAGUE'S SUDDEN RELEVANCE IN INTERCOLLEGIATE SWIMMING.

Here, I thought the fun was going to come to women's college basketball.  "I have, however, long entertained a wicked thought that someday, somewhere, there is a basketball coach who will end the dominance of Connecticut, or perhaps Stanford or Notre Dame, by recruiting a few male-to-female crossers who can really crash the boards."

Apparently, it's Pennsylvania swimming where the fun has come.

While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Thomas’ latest round of swimming record destruction came at a three-day meet in Akron, Ohio where numerous pool, meet and program records weren’t just destroyed but lowered to a point where they may never be broken. Friday, the Ivy League 500 freestyle record was broken. Saturday, Thomas set the nation’s best time in the 200 freestyle, which also destroyed pool, meet, and Penn program records.

Records are falling, and the swim coach is in a better position both in the pool and with the wokesters, but are things going well in the locker room?

“Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach [Mike Schnur] just really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do,” the female Penn swimmer said during a phone interview.

“When the whole team is together, we have to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.’ It’s very fake,” she added.

Needless to say, 2021 has been a huge change for the Penn women’s swimming team compared to where the program was in 2019 and the early part of 2020 before COVID caused the shutdown of the program for the 2020 season. Members of the team were first alerted to the forthcoming change in 2019 when Thomas, who was second-team All-Ivy League as a male during the 2018-19 season, announced that he would be going through the transition that would allow him to compete as a woman under the NCAA’s transgender policy.

How different is the performance of a swimming crosser from the traditional stars?

Fast forward to the fall of 2021. Penn is five meets and an invitational into the season and the school now has a legitimate contender for NCAA titles in the prestigious freestyle category. Olympic heroes Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky hold NCAA records that Thomas could own by the end of the 2021-22 season.

“The Ivy League is not a fast league for swimming, so that’s why it’s particularly ridiculous that we could potentially have an NCAA champion. That’s unheard of coming from the Ivy League,” Thomas’ teammate explained.

“On paper, if Lia Thomas gets back down to Will Thomas’ best times, those numbers are female world records. Faster than all the times Katie Ledecky went in college. Faster than any other Olympian you can think of. His times in three events are [female] world records.”

Whether the governing body for college sports has the transition policy right or not is a matter for further research.

“For the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” lead author Dr. Timothy Roberts, from Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, told NBC News. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women.”

Roberts gathered the data while studying the athletic performance of men and women in the Air Force who were required to go through physical readiness tests. Researchers reviewed test results and medical records of 29 trans men and 46 trans women.

“We compared pre-and post-hormone fitness test results of the trans women and trans men with the average performance of all women and men under the age of 30 in the Air Force between 2004 and 2014. We also measured the rate of hormone-associated changes in body composition and athletic performance,” the authors stated.

The average age of participants was 26.2 years old.

“Prior to gender affirming hormones, trans women performed 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in 1 min and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than their female counterparts. After 2 years of taking feminizing hormones, the push-up and sit-up differences disappeared but trans women were still 12% faster,” the study states.

The court of public opinion has not yet ruled, although the Penn swimmer who gave this interview has a sad perspective.

While the sports policymakers are busy figuring out what those future rules look like to protect the space that biological women have fought for, members of the Penn women’s swim team are left trying to make sense of what is becoming of their sport in 2021 and what the future might look like.

“When I have kids, I kinda hope they’re all boys because if I have any girls that want to play sports in college, good luck. [Their opponents] are all going to be biological men saying that they’re women,” Thomas’ teammate told OutKick. “Right now we have one, but what if we had three on the team? There’d be three less girls competing.”

Perhaps in twenty years, reality will have a few innings. First, I suspect that people will not cross simply to have a better chance at a medal in some high school or college sport.  Psychiatric medicine will have more cases of crossers and be better equipped to evaluate the claims of preadolescent gender dysphoria.  The thinness of the dating market among the alphabet people will also have an effect.