Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
This study reports improvements for high school swimmers reassigned to higher competitive classifications compared to swimmers remaining in the same classification in consecutive seasons as transmitted through changes in peer quality and ordinal ranking. The enrollment criterion adopted by high school athletic associations in the United States for the designation of competitive classifications provides plausibly exogenous assignments to environments of varying competition levels for better identification of peer effects. Evidence of responses that vary by stroke complexity may motivate future research to investigate the applicability of the findings to settings with similar levels of task heterogeneity.