Attention all regional championship meet directors! This message comes from the capital of master racing--New England. Here in the upper right hand of the U.S. our members participate in competitons at rate of close to 50%. This year, we are putting out a challenge to all other parts of the country for this year's SCM season. We propose to score our 2002 New England Short Course Meters Competition, scheduled for December 14-15th against all other regional SCM competitions to determine regional bragging rights for SCM Regional Team Championship. SPMA has already accepted the challenge and will go head-to-head against New England.
Here's how it works: We will take results file from all participating regional USMS sanctioned SCM championship meets held from October 1st through December 31st of this year. We will treat ever participant in that meet as a member of one "regional team" and score to the 16th place by age group (relays score twice the number of points and will also be scored to the 16th place). We will include all individual events through the 1500 m and all realys through the 800m. We will present results in two different ways: 1) Virtual SCM Championship and 2) Bilateral Regional meets (NE vs SPMA, for example).
Here's how you can participate: Send me an email "registering" your regional championship in this contest. We plan to score this meet using Hy Tek so we ask that people provide appropriate Hy Tek file.
Why are we doing this?
Over the years, we've learned that getting people to participate in competition keeps them swimming masters longer. New England's membership really took off when we created large regional championship meets with LOTS OF RELAYS. This made the meet fun for everyone and first-time competitors find relays the least intimidating way of getting into the racing spirit. We believe the regional championships are the key to getting USMS membership growth up to 25% range and getting our membership retention rate over 80%- that has been our four year average rate in both categories here in New England.
More information on the New England meet can be found at:
www.greatbaymasters.org/02scmchamp.html
How can you help?
I need a good list of regional SCM championship meets (I do have the list from the USMS calendar but it's not complete) and also need the email contacts for people, other than meet directors, who can help promote this in their region
Bob Seltzer
NEM Championship Meet Coordinator
We'll take into account your suggestion and report back in January. Re scoring. When Ed Gendreau scored the "mythical" SCM Championship he did show the results both with and without relays. So I expect we'll do the same. You are right that the whole purpose of this exercise is not to determine which region is the "fastest" but which region is able to get more people to participate in a regional championship meet and especially to encourage people to swim lots of relays. We're trying to develop a "regional team" identity in other parts of the country. We think the team aspect of swimming provides another motivator for people to swim and have fun.
I am just curious, it is Washingtons Birthday, 2003, almost the END of Feburary. I thought that we were going to have the virtual 2002 SCM championship scored by now. What is happening?
Everyone wants to know the results. Maybe NEM is still adding some relays to be scored :-) .
I look forward to seeing the results of the virtual SCM championship from the mythical center of Masters Swimming. :-)
michael
It's been sitting on my desk. It proved to be a lot harder than I originally thought to merge everything together. I thought I could do it in Hy-Tek Meet Manager... but that proved to be impossible. And two of the participating meets didn't have Meet Manager results (only SDIF files), so it would have been impossible to merge those results in.
New England Masters recently acquired a copy of Hy-Tek Team Manager, which I think may do the job... it should at least aggregate the results. I may still need to write something to apply a scoring to those aggregates. It's still mighty cumbersome to go through and change all of the data so that each "meet" appears instead as a "team", while making sure results don't get lost or deleted, etc.
The other problem is that I'm personally running four championship meets over the next five week-ends (since the NEM SCY meet is two week-ends long), so things have been busy.... not to mention my day job.
I hope to take another stab at this next week sometime.
-Rick
