Deck Seeding

Phil, The internet option was a very nice additon from past meets, Mark had also looked into offering a phone in option but for some reason it didn't happen this time. Of far more signifigance to me was that unlike past meets we had heet sheets each morning, a nice way to keep track of not only your events but of fellow swimmers. I hated having to wait till 30-60 minutes before my race to see lane assignments as well as when friends were swimming. When you combine this with the "real time" results on the web it allowed a lot of us to go back to our homes/hotels for a few hours, keep an eye on the schedule and escape the heat, another nice feature. All in all a very well run meet mark!

Gil, the scanner sheets might be a good alternative to internet check in. A swimmer would pick up a scanner sheet for every event he/she plans to swim in, bubble in his/her name, the event (and anyother info the committee wants) and turn each one in by the event's a deadline. A volunteer would feed the scanner sheet into the scanner.. the scanner would transfer the info to the computer data base and then the computer would print out heat sheets, a confirmation to be handed back to the swimmer, etc. just a thought... if it seems like something the committee would like to look into I'd be glad to help.

To answer Phil's question, Internet check-in was available for each day of the meet in Tempe. Internet check-in ran at the same times that physical check-in was available. The change from circling numbers to initialing was made after the difficulty the administrative team had in seeding the meet on the first day. In order to get the head sheets printed in time for the next morning, we had to have them to the printer by a certain time. With the procedure we used at the beginning of the meet, we were not going to be able to hit that delivery time. We realize that this caused some confusion and will try to avoid this if we use this again in the future. We also looked into Lainey's suggestion of having everything be done by computer. This adds some challenges to the meet host. First, you need a large number of computers and fast Internet connections. If we had 10 computers set up to handle this, each workstation would have had 190 people visit it each day. Because many of our members are not comfortable on computers, each would have had to have a volunteer working with the workstation. I am not sure what the best solution is. Any time you work with numbers of 1000 to 2000, things become very complicated and take much longer than expected. The Championship Committee will continue to work towards improving this and other aspects of our championship meets. Thanks for the feedback, Mark Gill Meet Director

One more comment regarding the change in method of check in: I scratched the 500 free on the last day, and therefore did not initial the line for that event. However, my name showed up in the heat sheets. It seemed that the swimmer's intention was much more obvious with either a circle or an "X" through an event number than initialing a very small blank line (often in a very tight space with other markings all around). I was extremely impressed by the running of this meet, given the number of entries. To Mark and everyone associated with putting this event on: Well done! I hope you've had a chance to recover by now!