The official 2026 Junior Pan Pacific Championships roster is out, so it's a good time to check our projection against it — where we got it right, where we didn't, and why.

The Scorecard

Women: 14 of 20 projected selections matched the official roster.

• Projected but not official: Rylee Erisman, Brinkleigh Hansen, Sydney Schoeck, Charlotte Crush, Alex Siegel, Emily Wolf
• Official but missed by projection: Paige Downey, Ellie Clarke, Kennedi Southern, Vivienne Zangaro, Lane Francis, Mia Buff

Men: 19 of 20 matched.

• Projected but not official: Cullen Kahl
• Official but missed by projection: Ellis Crisci

The Known Issue

Our model builds projections from final time rankings, filtered by age eligibility — it doesn't currently know which heat a swimmer actually competed in. That's a meaningful gap, because selection isn't purely time-based: only athletes who actually swim in the 18-U final are eligible for consideration in that event. A swimmer can be fast enough on paper and still be ineligible, for reasons our current data doesn't capture.

We've traced most of the women's misses back to two variants of that same root cause:

1. Already on a Senior Pan Pacs Team.
Rylee Erisman (Pan Pacs) and Brinkleigh Hansen (open water) were both already on senior rosters heading into this meet, which makes them ineligible for Junior Pan Pacs regardless of how fast they swam here. Our model has no way to check senior-team status yet, so it projected them anyway.

2. Opted out of the 18-U final entirely.
Charlotte Crush swam directly in the Open final in every event we checked, with no record of racing an 18-U final all week — meaning she was never actually in consideration for a Junior Pan Pacs spot, whatever her time-only ranking suggested. Sydney Schoeck's results follow the same pattern in the events we've checked so far, though we haven't confirmed it across her full event list yet.

The Boys' Side: Fully Resolved

The one men's miss came down to a head-to-head Priority-3 comparison, not a data gap:

• Ellis Crisci, 400 Free: 3:50.89 vs. 3:42.43 Medal Standard = +3.806%
• Cullen Kahl, 200 IM: 2:00.28 vs. 1:55.80 Medal Standard = +3.869%

Luka Mijatovic opted out of the 400 Free 18-U final, and Crisci was actually 2nd place in that final. Crisci ended up marginally closer to the Medal Standard than Kahl, which gave him the last Priority-3 spot. Straightforward once you have the actual final results — our projection just didn't know about Mijatovic's opt-out.

Still Open

After the known-issue cases above, the remaining women's differences are:

• Projected: Alex Siegel, Sydney Schoeck, Kayla Han, Mena Boardman
• Official: Kennedi Southern, Vivienne Zangaro, Grace Koenig-Song, Mia Buff

We haven't traced these back to a specific cause yet. We'll follow up once we've worked through them. In the meantime, this is exactly the kind of gap that tells us where to improve the model — tracking actual 18-U vs. Open final participation, and senior-team status, instead of relying on time rankings alone.

Official 2026 Junior Pan Pacs Roster

Women

Men