Who made the order of events for Fort Lauderdale Nationals?

Craig, I apologize if I seemed arrogant in my prior post. That was not my intention. Nationals is a balancing act between the desire of athletes, cost of the facilities, ability of the volunteers and time. If we put an event like the 1000 or 1650 on a Saturday, we would probably not be able to offer other events that day. That would drive participation down in the overall event. Potentially, the meet could lose money. It is really a matter of economics and limited resources. To give you an idea, the 2003 SC nationals had expenses of over $100,000. There is risk to a meet host in running a national event. With all the work and time put in (over 60,000 volunteer hours during the event - not to mention the year and a half of planning prior to the event). As an organization, USMS has to make sure there is the potential for a positive return for the organizations that agree to host our events. To do that, we put our most popular events on Saturday and Sunday (the largest attendance days). Is this unfair to distance swimmers. Probably. But it is the unfortunate truth that we can't have as many swimmers served during an hour of distance racing as we can during an hour of shorter events. Some possible solutions that are being explored. * this summer we are running a 5 day format for LC Nationals. The 1500 and 800 are separeted over two days. The swimmers that meet the qualifying times in both events can swim both. The events are Thursday and Monday. Still not on the most popular days, but it will allow athletes to swim both. There is a higher cost to this solution. Not only is there pool costs (between $1000 - $5000 per day), there is also the cost of additional volunteers, you have to use an additional day of vacation, spend another night in a hotel and eat out one more day. * We can seed the distance events by time only disregarding gender and age group. Typically this will save about 1.5 hours over an event. * Some zone meets charge a higher price for distance events to account for the length of time and additional cost of the events. Basically, they price discriminating the distance events. In this case, a regular event costs $2.50 and a distance race costs $20. * Other have proposed that we tighten the time standards so only the very elite can swim the longer events. * another proposal is to make all distance swimmers swim 2 per lane to cut down on time. Not a populare option among distance athletes, but this is mandated at World championships. As you can see, not all of these solutions are ideal. However, it is a difficult problem when a single heat can take over 40 minutes. In 2003, swimming in 16 lanes, it took over 6 hours to get through the 1650 and 5 hours for the 1000. That was with only 200 athletes competing at each distance compared to over 800 in the 50 free. Now, the rest of that meet had 1600, 1900 and 1800 athletes attending on the following days. If only 400 people wanted to swim a distance event, we would be looking at a 10 - 12 hour day that only offered the 1650 or 1000. You are right, this is a membership driven organization. The feeling of the championship committee is that only offering a single event on a Saturday would not serve our membership well. However, we don't claim to know all the answers and try to consider the suggestions made by members, so if you have a better idea, we would certainly be open to it.

Craig, I apologize if I seemed arrogant in my prior post. That was not my intention. Nationals is a balancing act between the desire of athletes, cost of the facilities, ability of the volunteers and time. If we put an event like the 1000 or 1650 on a Saturday, we would probably not be able to offer other events that day. That would drive participation down in the overall event. Potentially, the meet could lose money. It is really a matter of economics and limited resources. To give you an idea, the 2003 SC nationals had expenses of over $100,000. There is risk to a meet host in running a national event. With all the work and time put in (over 60,000 volunteer hours during the event - not to mention the year and a half of planning prior to the event). As an organization, USMS has to make sure there is the potential for a positive return for the organizations that agree to host our events. To do that, we put our most popular events on Saturday and Sunday (the largest attendance days). Is this unfair to distance swimmers. Probably. But it is the unfortunate truth that we can't have as many swimmers served during an hour of distance racing as we can during an hour of shorter events. Some possible solutions that are being explored. * this summer we are running a 5 day format for LC Nationals. The 1500 and 800 are separeted over two days. The swimmers that meet the qualifying times in both events can swim both. The events are Thursday and Monday. Still not on the most popular days, but it will allow athletes to swim both. There is a higher cost to this solution. Not only is there pool costs (between $1000 - $5000 per day), there is also the cost of additional volunteers, you have to use an additional day of vacation, spend another night in a hotel and eat out one more day. * We can seed the distance events by time only disregarding gender and age group. Typically this will save about 1.5 hours over an event. * Some zone meets charge a higher price for distance events to account for the length of time and additional cost of the events. Basically, they price discriminating the distance events. In this case, a regular event costs $2.50 and a distance race costs $20. * Other have proposed that we tighten the time standards so only the very elite can swim the longer events. * another proposal is to make all distance swimmers swim 2 per lane to cut down on time. Not a populare option among distance athletes, but this is mandated at World championships. As you can see, not all of these solutions are ideal. However, it is a difficult problem when a single heat can take over 40 minutes. In 2003, swimming in 16 lanes, it took over 6 hours to get through the 1650 and 5 hours for the 1000. That was with only 200 athletes competing at each distance compared to over 800 in the 50 free. Now, the rest of that meet had 1600, 1900 and 1800 athletes attending on the following days. If only 400 people wanted to swim a distance event, we would be looking at a 10 - 12 hour day that only offered the 1650 or 1000. You are right, this is a membership driven organization. The feeling of the championship committee is that only offering a single event on a Saturday would not serve our membership well. However, we don't claim to know all the answers and try to consider the suggestions made by members, so if you have a better idea, we would certainly be open to it.