Thanks everyone... I just found the problem and it was vertices not connected. Once I connected the vertices, swiftloop worked. Rookie mistake, but at least there are people like you guys to help me out.
Make sure you have all the verts welded, there aren't double faces (lamina faces), there isn't an extra vertice in the middle of an edge, the normals aren't flipped on that face, etc. Every time I've had loop select not work it was because of some type of topology error that broke the polygon strip.