Nick Fulton is currently a swimming student-athlete at Wisconsin. He is also a member of the national student-athlete advisory committee (SAAC) as the representative from the Big Ten Conference. Fulton also swam in the U.S. Olympic qualifier this past year.

In the past twelve years, the sport of swimming has perhaps seen its biggest changes. From how strokes are taught to the equipment we use it is almost as if it is a different sport today than it was before. The changes are evident too; world records just keep dropping. Every four years, swimming gets to take center stage. The Olympics serve as a showcase for summer's most popular sport and this year was no exception. One difference however this year was the amount of focus that was put upon not the swimmers themselves, but the suits they were wearing.

Any casual sports fan knows by now that these suits are not what you wear to the pool trying to escape the heat on summer's hottest day. These are not even the suits that Mark Spitz and Rowdy Gaines made famous in their day showing all, and hiding very little. Instead, these suits are technological wonders. Scientists - even some from NASA - took a break from curing cancer and building shuttles to design these suits. They are hydrodynamic, hydrophobic, custom fitted, and, well, expensive. Sure swimmers are swimming faster with them on, but there are a lot of questions when it comes to these suits. Is it really the suit making swimmers faster? Is this a good direction for the sport of swimming to head?

In my four years of swimming collegiately at a great university, I have been fortunate enough to be in a position to try many different types of suits. Our team has worn Nike, TYR, Speedo and Blue Seventy, which pretty much covers the spectrum as far as the main players in the swimsuit battle. The decision of what suit to wear has always relied upon us doing whatever we thought would be the fastest. A lot has changed in just the past four years and this summer I switched from wearing a Nike suit to the famous (or infamous) Speedo LZR. The result? I swam my fastest 100 Backstroke ever and qualified for the Olympic Trials. So that's it then, just put on the suit and you can go really fast, right? Not so fast (pun intended).

No matter what suit technology comes out in the following years, swimming will always require an incredible amount of dedication and preparation. There will be no way to avoid the 5:30am practices or the thousands and thousands and thousands of yards swam each week. Depending on the athlete and the event, these suits are designed to drop tenths of seconds, not ten seconds. Granted, in swimming terms, a tenth of a second can make the difference between first and not being a finalist, but it's the athletes who have the speed. It is because of this that I don't completely buy into all the swimsuit hoopla. If you are to succeed in this brutal sport, it is going to be because of the time you have put in and the mental toughness you have - not because of the suit you wear.

What worries me though is the hoopla. What accompanies the showcase of the Olympics is the quadrennial influx of young swimmers. About half the swimmers on my collegiate team started swimming at least in part because they watched the Olympics and asked their parents to take them to the pool so they could chase that yellow WR line. It is these future athletes that I am worried for.

Swimming has always been an inexpensive sport. All you have ever needed was some shorts, maybe some goggles and a neighborhood pool. With the introduction of these high performance, highly expensive suits, swimming is following the pattern of other highly expensive sports like hockey and football. These suits after all, cost upwards of $300 or $400 and last for only a handful of swims. That, coupled with increased registration fees and pool time means that parents who think their child needs to wear one of these suits might have to spend a couple thousand dollars a year on swimming!

The fact of the matter is that kids do not need to be wearing these ultra expensive suits. If they love the sport of swimming and would like to succeed they need to spend time learning about the strokes and practicing hard. I hope that this message is conveyed to current and potential swim parents everywhere because there is nothing I would like to see more than the number of young swimmers increase because of the valuable life lessons and relative inexpensiveness of swimming.

While kids do not need to wear these suits, the best in the sport do. Whatever is decided by the governing body of swimming, I hope that it does not hinder the development of new technology for the sport. Swimmers are some of the most dedicated athletes on the planet and for them not to have access to what they think will serve them best would be extremely disappointing. I am glad that the NCAA realized this when they raised the moratorium on the "swimsuit issue" this fall, allowing for all approved suits to be used at the NCAA Championships.

Whatever happens, I can guarantee this: records are going to continue to fall and athletes are going to continue to amaze - just as they always have.