Colonies Zone SCY Championships - Fairfax VA

If it's true that some of the swimmers are entering the 1000 with times of 1 hour and 45 minutes, perhaps there is another solution you could try. Assuming many of the Team Z participants really are triathletes, why not offer them the chance to swim in groups in the same lane? They could practice drafting and jostling about for position, which are skills required in triathlon swimming. If individual swimmers are shooting for a Top 10 time and have a reasonable chance to make this, they could request a lane to themselves--in fact, even the slowest swimmers could do this. But I suspect many of them just want to gauge their swimming prowess at this stage of the season and might even volunteer to swim more than one person per lane. You could offer this as a possibility (1 per lane, 2 per lane with no circle swimming, or 3 or more with circle swimming mandatory), explaining that for your time to count for TT purposes, you'd have to opt for 1 per lane, but if this doesn't really matter to you, it would allow more pool swimmers to enter the event if they'd share a lane. In our little Y league, there is a rule that you must swim 3 local meets (though one of these can be a mail-in 1650 you do at your own pool) in order to qualify for championships. It helps ensure that the local meets are better attended. I do feel really bad for guys like Tom Patterson, who are distance beasts and don't have that many opportunities to swim the 1000 or 1650 along with the other events in a really good racing pool not too far away from where he lives. Anyhow, maybe it's not too late for someone diplomatic (Jeff or Muppet) to call up the Team Z captain and see if some of the swimmers would be willing to share a lane. If so, maybe some more spots could open up for the Tom's and Betsy's and other Zones regulars whose presence will be missed by us CZ regulars!

If it's true that some of the swimmers are entering the 1000 with times of 1 hour and 45 minutes, perhaps there is another solution you could try. Assuming many of the Team Z participants really are triathletes, why not offer them the chance to swim in groups in the same lane? They could practice drafting and jostling about for position, which are skills required in triathlon swimming. If individual swimmers are shooting for a Top 10 time and have a reasonable chance to make this, they could request a lane to themselves--in fact, even the slowest swimmers could do this. But I suspect many of them just want to gauge their swimming prowess at this stage of the season and might even volunteer to swim more than one person per lane. You could offer this as a possibility (1 per lane, 2 per lane with no circle swimming, or 3 or more with circle swimming mandatory), explaining that for your time to count for TT purposes, you'd have to opt for 1 per lane, but if this doesn't really matter to you, it would allow more pool swimmers to enter the event if they'd share a lane. In our little Y league, there is a rule that you must swim 3 local meets (though one of these can be a mail-in 1650 you do at your own pool) in order to qualify for championships. It helps ensure that the local meets are better attended. I do feel really bad for guys like Tom Patterson, who are distance beasts and don't have that many opportunities to swim the 1000 or 1650 along with the other events in a really good racing pool not too far away from where he lives. Anyhow, maybe it's not too late for someone diplomatic (Jeff or Muppet) to call up the Team Z captain and see if some of the swimmers would be willing to share a lane. If so, maybe some more spots could open up for the Tom's and Betsy's and other Zones regulars whose presence will be missed by us CZ regulars!