Pacific Masters SCY Championships

Bob: Well the meet may have finished, but the meet is not over until all the paperwork is finished. Luckily, my part of the meet is over. I would love to send a .cl2 file except that we dont use Hy-Tech for meet management. We use a program that a local vendor developed. Just for the fun of it, I tried to score the 50-54 age group as we are both in that age group. NEM has some awesome swims. If anyone wanted to run up the scores it would have to be a tedious hand job. It might be difficult to score as we both had different rules for entering events. In the distance events- the 1650 and the 1000, Pacific looked like we had more swimmer in the top ten positions. Pacific also lets distance swimmers in both long distance events. If I read the NEM meet sheet, and judging by past history there is no guarentee of that, a NEM swimmer could enter 10 individual events. Pacific has a limit of seven events per meet. So with the same number of good swimmers, NEM has an almost 50% advantage. I think it might be fun to score. We can work on the details. (If the NEM meet gets much bigger, what are you going to do? run two courses or longer days :cool: ) michael

Michael: What kind of text output can you generate on your end? I've talked to some other "regional" championship meet directors about submitting results in a common format for purposes of "scoring" and also for compiling certain performance lists. The objective is to look at developing some new "marketing" material to further build interest in such meets. Based on the meet feedback we received from the 2002 Championships it's pretty obvious that next year's meet will be bigger (700+). We have a few options. We can use some additional lanes in the "shallow" end of the 50 meter course. Another option is to use another 50 meter pool in the area. We might then run 2 8-9 lane courses for distance event and 1 10 lane course for all other events. Meet participants appreciate shorter timelines. (I was especially glad to be at Zones with two 8 lane courses and 420 participants. We finished before 1:00 pm on both days). At the same time, we get complaints regarding two courses of competition. People feel that we lose some of the "high enery meet ambiance" when running two courses. Perhaps a two course set-up for distance and 10 lane course for other distances will work for meet up to 800 participants. Bob PS: Yes, the NEM male 50-54 age group was very competitive this year much to my regret.

Bob: I only have text files that have been generated by the local meet management system and these files are in two columns. (The good part is that it follows a column format). I might be fun to have a series of meets that are all on the same day. We are working on trying to get an SDIF file from the meets, but it may take a while. We would have to set up a way so that everyone can compete in the same number of events. I hope you are able to expand your meet. I wonder how big a meet can be. At some point swimmers will just leave for home if it goes to long. In Pacific, we have found a the limit to be around 900 swimmers. A meet with 900 swimmers makes for a very long day (even when running two courses, but then we let the distance swimmers swim both the 1000 and 1650 which does stretch the day). I am interested in how to make our meets more efficient. Run men and women together in all events 400 yards or longer? I would be interesting to swim against all your lane mates. michael

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.

One other thing that could make things _very_ interesting is to run the meets on a concurrent week-end, with the same format. Hy-Tek allows for running one meet in two different pools... which is easily extended to running one meet in two different facilties, I think. To be really neat, we could set things up so that the west coast meet ran 8am-3pm and the east coast meet ran 11am-6pm so that the events were happening at nearly the same time. With a little bit of Internet wizardry, we could have combined results posted at both facilities as soon as the last heat was finished in either time zone. -Rick