Pacific Masters SCY Championships

You are probably right 700 is about swimmers on a single course, but we will have the same basic facility a 50 M x 25 yard pool and get a much higher yield. Differences between "center of Masters Racing" and "former Center" Courses on 50 meter pool (NEM) 1 eight lane (Pac) 2 seven lane warm up (NEM) 6 lanes (PAC) 1 lane (but it is a wide lane) :D Number of events swimmer can enter individual (NEM) 4 (PAC) 7 (five on one day) relays (NEM) 2 (PAC) 5 distance swimming (NEM) either 1650 or 1000 (PAC) can enter both check in (NEM) one hour b4 start (PAC) 30 min b4 start (NEM) must check in by 9:30 (PAC) checkin up to 30 min before start Of course one can only play the cards they have been delt. I would try to survey the membership about what they felt about swimming in two courses. If the six warm up lanes have starting blocks, I would run two six lane courses - women events on both courses then men events. Yes they are not equal. Life is unfair - shut up and swim - you can be meet director next year). No matter if you are running two course or one course, your starter and ref are going to run your time line. If you want to try to keep the time line under control (this is for large meets) if a swimmer does not show up at the blocks at the start of the event either no calling for the swimmer or call the for swimmer once - and that is quick call). Swimmer misses his/her heat or is not seeded - Swimmers fault: sorry about that, we are not going to put you in. Meet Managements fault: try to put the swimmer in an earlier heat if swimmer is agreeable or know how to split the heat and do it fast. Swimmers talk to each other and if meet management is allowing a good excuse to get a swimmer in another heat, you will hear some very creative excuses. When we take a tough line, much fewer excuses. With a dive over start, and a starter and ref who a running the timeline, you can get a heat off in a good start in about 20 seconds after the final swimmer of the previous heat touches the wall. It is very easy to let it slip to 30 to 40 seconds, multiply out by the hundreds of heats you have and you lengthen the time line a lot. good luck Rick and Bob michael known for sticking his nose in where it does not belong consultant for large meets and available next weekend if you want to pay my air fare. lol member - former "Center of Masters Racing"

The "new center of masters swimming" is figuring out that 700 entrants is about the limit for a 3-day meet in a single course. -Rick

I thought we were both looking at SCY meets in the immediate future... not LCM meets. The New England SCY meet is at Harvard, which (for SCY) has an8-lane competition course and a 6-lane warmup course (which is too shallow for blocks). Couple of corrections on your comparisons. :) * NEM meet check-in is one hour before the event. There's no absolute cut-off in the morning. Complete rolling check-in. (We find that unless heat sheets are posted 45 minutes +/- before the event, people start getting really anxious about heats and lanes, etc.) * Maximum events. For NEM SCY, maximum of 10 individual events for the week-end. Friday you can swim 1650 _or_ 1000 and/or 400 IM, and then max of 4 events Saturday and Sunday. This year, you can swim all five relays if you want. Oh, plus, we have our "ocean" area available for warmup also, which is the 30 yard x 20 yard space between the competition and warmup courses. So we may end up with 6 25-yard lanes and 3-4 30-yard lanes. Last year, we were able to get it down to about 10 seconds between heats. It takes an on-the-ball person running the timing system, mostly. There's a new pool being built at a technical school just down the river from Harvard that will be capable of running two 25-yard courses. We're definitely going to be investigating the possibility of running this meet there in the future, to run on two courses. Unfortunately, for LCM, there's no such thing as a facility with two 50-meter courses in the northeast. -Rick NEM SCY Champs Operations Director

You raise an interesting point regarding two courses versus one course. Obviously for meets with 2000 participants there isn't a real choice. However for regional championship meets with 600-1000 participants its an interesting question. A few years ago, we did run a NE SCY Championship meet with two 8 lane courses at Brown. We had around 500 participants and the timeline was quite short by local standards. However, I did receive quite a few complaints about how the "meet was run too fast" and that teams complained they couldn't watch their teammates race in the other course. My question is whether anyone has actually run a regional competition where you run two 8 lane courses for distance events and single 10+ course for non-distance events?

Congratulations to Michael and all the others that helped to put on an excellent meet; to us swimmers it was well run and a lot of fun. And thanks to whatever power made the weather perfect - warm and sunny. It was expecially nice to step off the pool deck for a spectacular view of Monterey Bay. According to the Pacific Masters web site www.pacificmasters.org the meet had 'over 800 swimmers' and 13 national records, two of which were relays. Yes, I think NEM is correct - their championship is the largest and best meet east of California!

For Bob, To answer your question ("My question is whether anyone has actually run a regional competition where you run two 8 lane courses for distance events and single 10+ course for non-distance events?"), we just held the NW Zone Championship meet at the Federal Way/King County Aquatic Center. When we hold our Zone/LMSC champs there, we typically have 250-300 swimmers (278 this year) and hold all of our events in one course except we use both courses for 500s and above. For the most part, that works well for us. This year, we started off with the 1000 (Sat.) and the 500 (Sun.) and were ready for the next events after about an hour. The flip side is that it doubles your volunteer requirements. When we tried to hold the 1650 at the end of the meet, we needed to ask for volunteer timers just so that we could save a half-hour (we scratched down to three heats total). I liked your story about the Brown meet. I'll admit that I don't run my timeline as "efficiently" as I possibly could for a regional meet because doing so makes the meet run "too fast", but I'll only do that here. In Boston and Santa Cruz and at Nationals, you have to be max-efficient or else you'll have very long days.

Pacific Masters Swimming held its Short Course Yards Championships last weekend, April 12,13,and 14 on the campus of the University of California Santa Cruz. This is the largest short course yards meet held west of the Charles River. The meet was blessed with great weather. 823 swimmers competed and the meet recorded 3214 splashes with 314 relay entries. Swimmers from 50 teams competed for the team high point awards. Thirteen National Records were broken. Laura Val after aging up for long course last year, aged up for short course this year and continues her assault on the womens 50-54 swimming records. In the 1650 Free on Friday she got a twofer. She broke the 1000 yard record on the way out to breaking the 1650. She also broke the standards in the 50 back, 100 back and 100 free. Other National records were broken Alan Cartwright 60-64(400 IM and 200 fly), Jae Howell (200 ***), Lee Rider 45-49 (50 ***), Bob Strand 55-59 (50 ***), Margery Sharp 85-89 (500 Fr), WCM 65+ (400 Mixed Free Relay), WCM 55+ (400 Medley Relay). University of San Francisco Masters won its tenth straight Large team short course yards title. The team winners include: Large Team 1. USF 2. Walnut Creek Masters 3. San Mateo Master Marlins Medium Team 1. Menlo Masters 2. Manatee Aquatic Masters 3. Burlingame Masters Watersports Small Team 1. The Olympic Club 2. Rolling Hills Mud Sharks 3. Rinconada Masters During a break on Sunday, Pacific recognized Laura Val and Robert Strand as 2001 Pacific Masters Swimmers of the Year. Laura won it for her awesome swimming during 2001 meters season, setting the world standard in 13 Long Course events and eight short course meters events (women 50-54). Bob Strand set the world standard in all the men's 55-59 Breaststroke events SCY, LCM and SCM. Thanks to Meet director Joel Wilson, Meet Operations Paul Wrangell, Meet Referee Bud Meyer (also known as Debbie's dad) and the entire Santa Cruz Masters for putting on the meet. michael pacific masters swimming still the "1" :cool:

The meet was blessed with great weather. 823 swimmers competed and the meet recorded 3214 splashes with 314 relay entries. Does the 3214 figure include the relays, or just individual splashes? I did a final report of the numbers for the NEM meet a couple weeks back, and we had: Female: 1188 splashes + 185 scratches + 40 no shows = 1413 entries Male: 1652 splashes + 292 scratches + 69 no shows = 2013 entries Individual: 2840 splashes + 477 scratches + 109 no shows = 3426 entries Relays: 326 splashes + 2 scratches + 2 no shows = 330 entries Total: 3166 splashes + 479 scratches + 111 no shows = 3756 entries That doesn't include perhaps 100 entries on 12 or so people that were pulled from the meet before we started... we just deleted the entries entirely because we refunded the entry fees. -Rick

At the very bottom of www.pacificmasters.org/.../02cruzscymen.html Scratches 813 328 485 no shows Actual Swims 3252 1535 1717 which means that the entries were entries 4065 1863 2202 There was also a line that says disqualification. I am not sure if that is a deduction from actual swims or not. The total DQs is 41 I just assume that the relays is the net number of relays. Relays are entered the day of the meet up to about 2 hours before the start of the first heat of relays. There were few relay no shows. The program that tracks the meet, SAMMS, is primarily geared for age group swimming, which is why scratchs and no shows are broken out. A no show is just shown as a scratch. I just assume that the program has correctly totaled the number of entries and scratchs. I am not going to count the number of entries (well I could take the information from the results then do a line count, but I am feeling lazy). On Friday the meet opened with the 1650 at 10:20am, the last heat of 1650 finished a little over five hours later around 3:30. On Saturday the first event was the 1000 free, which finished about 1 pm. The 1650 and the 1000 (and all the events) were run on two courses. After the distance events the meet seemed to move very quickly. The 50's took about 20 minutes from the start of the first heat to the end of the fastest heat. One of the things being considered is the mix the mens and womens 1650, 1000 and 500 and run the entire events by time. This would save a lot of time as you dont have two very slow heats. We are always looking for ways to run the meet more efficiently. One way is to have dive over starts (idea taken from NEM). michael

Michael: First, congratulations on a successful meet. Bet everyone involved in happy its over. Second, dive-over-starting works real well--especially the second year. People that complained the first time around really like the way it works. They find it easy to anticipate the flow of events and we didn't have problems with no shows. Third, in fairness, you were one of the people that convinced me that positive check-in can work. (Ed Gendreau was the first to try it in New England). Fourth, great to see that you using this forum for post-meet summaries. I think it vitally important to improve meet promotion. Lastly, why don't you send us your .CL2 file and we'll score Pacific Masters meet versus NE meet just for the fun of it? We've had this friendly bantering about the "largest" meet (I think we might judged just about even in terms of splashes/relays). I have an idea that this might be an interesting way to promote regional meets (see USMS long-term planning) and might also give us a way to be more aware of what's happening across the country. I know that NEMs will come out in even bigger numbers if they have a chance to eventually "defeat" Pacific Masters in a "electronic" super-regional competition (shades of mythical HS championship?).