Who made the order of events for Fort Lauderdale Nationals?

WB, You have touched on a most debatable subject separate from the order of events argument, which is what should our championship look like. Perhaps this is better dealt with on another thread, but I will give a brief answer here. The delegates that each LMSC send to the annual convention are divided into two camps. One agrees with you and feels this meet should be a true national championship with tough qualifying times. (Worlds will have qualifying times for all events at Stanford, 2006, but they are much easier than our NQT's). There is another group that feels nationals is an event for everyone, but only the fastest can swim more than three events. They point to how a championship meet builds the membership in the area hosting the meet. My guess is that time and growth will force us to move to your view of a championship meet. Already, we are having to make our qualifying times more difficult to try and control the size of the LC meet this summer. Our championships are about as big as we can handle (2000 for SC and 1000 - 1200 for LC). If they grow much bigger, we may do things such as restrict the free events to only 2 events. As our Zone meets become bigger, it will ease some of the pressure on nationals as well. As for improving the order of events, I will pass the suggestion along that first 3 event are not the longest. However, there will probably still be a distance event on each day of the meet. If we were to swim both the men's and women's 500 on the same day, that would be a very long event (over 5 hours). To give you an idea, the women's 500 free lasts 3 hours, the men's lasts 2.75 hours and the 400 IM lasts 2.75 hours, the 1650 last 5.5 hours and the 1000 free last 4 hours in a typical SC meet swimming 16 lanes. These numbers come from a meet with only 1700 swimmers. WB, if you want to put together a better schedule of events for a 4-day meet, I will see that it gets submitted for consideration. If you don't want to post it here for public abuse, you can send it to me at mark.gill@usms.org Thanks for your input,

WB, You have touched on a most debatable subject separate from the order of events argument, which is what should our championship look like. Perhaps this is better dealt with on another thread, but I will give a brief answer here. The delegates that each LMSC send to the annual convention are divided into two camps. One agrees with you and feels this meet should be a true national championship with tough qualifying times. (Worlds will have qualifying times for all events at Stanford, 2006, but they are much easier than our NQT's). There is another group that feels nationals is an event for everyone, but only the fastest can swim more than three events. They point to how a championship meet builds the membership in the area hosting the meet. My guess is that time and growth will force us to move to your view of a championship meet. Already, we are having to make our qualifying times more difficult to try and control the size of the LC meet this summer. Our championships are about as big as we can handle (2000 for SC and 1000 - 1200 for LC). If they grow much bigger, we may do things such as restrict the free events to only 2 events. As our Zone meets become bigger, it will ease some of the pressure on nationals as well. As for improving the order of events, I will pass the suggestion along that first 3 event are not the longest. However, there will probably still be a distance event on each day of the meet. If we were to swim both the men's and women's 500 on the same day, that would be a very long event (over 5 hours). To give you an idea, the women's 500 free lasts 3 hours, the men's lasts 2.75 hours and the 400 IM lasts 2.75 hours, the 1650 last 5.5 hours and the 1000 free last 4 hours in a typical SC meet swimming 16 lanes. These numbers come from a meet with only 1700 swimmers. WB, if you want to put together a better schedule of events for a 4-day meet, I will see that it gets submitted for consideration. If you don't want to post it here for public abuse, you can send it to me at mark.gill@usms.org Thanks for your input,