The Pacific Masters Swimming 2002 Short Course Yards Championships will be held at the University of California Santa Cruz April 12, 13, and 14. The postmark deadline is March 30 and must arrive no later than April 3rd.
Santa Cruz is a beautiful scenic town on the California coast just north of Montery and about 70 miles south of San Francisco. There are many reasonably priced hotels near the pool. There are also many unreasonably priced hotels there also.
The meet sheet is at
www.pacificmasters.org/.../02cruzscy.html
There are many Pacific Masters swimmers who are in New Zealand competing at the FINA World Masters Champioships, so it might be the year to sneak a medal.
(It the Championships have less than 700 swimmers entered, it will be considered a small championship) :D
Pacific Masters
(Former center of Masters Racing) :p
Mike:
We should at least agree upon some common format for results and then can "score" the various regional championship meets. Why not use Hy-tek? Hasn't USMS "standardized" on this software for USMS Nationals?
What is the optimum size of a regional championship meet? You're probably not far off. I'm thinking that around 1,000 is the upper limit BUT you need to have two courses, positive check-in for all events AND perfect dive-over starting. Our members will pretty much tolerate a large meet IF it is very well run and finishes around 2-3 pm. Once we start to get past 4:00 pm people start complaining. I'm pretty sure that the NEM meet management team that ran 2002 SCY Championships can handle a meet with 1,000 swimmers, two courses and 350+ relays and finish within the majic 2-3 pm window. Rick Osterberg has saved the timeline from this year's championship (it's on the www.swimindex.com/meets website ) and could probably calculate how much earlier we would have finished with two courses.
The problem with swimming the distance events with men/women combined is that the time difference between check-in and when you actually swim becomes fairly long. (This was an obvious problem with NEs this year since we used only one course for the 1650). Even with two courses I still think you're better off swimming women then men. I also think its a real time saver to limit swimmers to either the 1650 or 1000.
I'm going to start a thread on regional championship meets once I get some more time. Unlike Nationals, which pretty much have limited prospects for future growth, the Regional Championship meets could become a very attractive alternative to Nationals for a lot of USMS swimmers. We do need to promote them properly (get them all up to the maximum size of 900-1,000) and make sure that the quality of the meet is equal to or better than found at current Nationals. This is the kind of discussion I'd like to see get started here sometime soon.
In the meantime, NE SCY will eventually move to a two course venue (maybe in 2003 no later than 2004) and we'll be prepared to "challenge" our big brother to the West in a cross-country regional championship.
Mike:
We should at least agree upon some common format for results and then can "score" the various regional championship meets. Why not use Hy-tek? Hasn't USMS "standardized" on this software for USMS Nationals?
What is the optimum size of a regional championship meet? You're probably not far off. I'm thinking that around 1,000 is the upper limit BUT you need to have two courses, positive check-in for all events AND perfect dive-over starting. Our members will pretty much tolerate a large meet IF it is very well run and finishes around 2-3 pm. Once we start to get past 4:00 pm people start complaining. I'm pretty sure that the NEM meet management team that ran 2002 SCY Championships can handle a meet with 1,000 swimmers, two courses and 350+ relays and finish within the majic 2-3 pm window. Rick Osterberg has saved the timeline from this year's championship (it's on the www.swimindex.com/meets website ) and could probably calculate how much earlier we would have finished with two courses.
The problem with swimming the distance events with men/women combined is that the time difference between check-in and when you actually swim becomes fairly long. (This was an obvious problem with NEs this year since we used only one course for the 1650). Even with two courses I still think you're better off swimming women then men. I also think its a real time saver to limit swimmers to either the 1650 or 1000.
I'm going to start a thread on regional championship meets once I get some more time. Unlike Nationals, which pretty much have limited prospects for future growth, the Regional Championship meets could become a very attractive alternative to Nationals for a lot of USMS swimmers. We do need to promote them properly (get them all up to the maximum size of 900-1,000) and make sure that the quality of the meet is equal to or better than found at current Nationals. This is the kind of discussion I'd like to see get started here sometime soon.
In the meantime, NE SCY will eventually move to a two course venue (maybe in 2003 no later than 2004) and we'll be prepared to "challenge" our big brother to the West in a cross-country regional championship.
