Thanks to everyone involved in the Ft. Lauderdale Nationals. I had a great time and met some exceptional people. I especially want to thank Doug Malcolm for the competition in the adjacent lane. It looks like (from USMS data) you have not competed for quite a while and had a great meet! I had not competed for over 20 years when I entered the 2001 Nat's at Santa Clara and have done pretty well for the past few years. Doug exemplifies what our sport should be all about; a true competitor who brings out the best in someone like me who may not have accomplished the standards acheived in Ft. Lauderdale without someone like him next to me. I never got a chance to thank you so I am doing so now. Keep up the good work!
I would also like to congradulate John Blank for being the first male competitor over 45 to break one minute in the 100 yard breaststroke; a great accomplishment! I have never broken a minute in that event and am full of envy.
Lee Rider
Team competition was debated at length in another thread on
"super teams", you might want to do a search if you are interested.
My pet scheme is to have two classes of team competition, one based on participation like the current system and a second based on small fixed size teams. Participation is a good goal and competition with unlimited numbers is a good thing, but competition based on differing numbers of swimmers is inherently uneven/unfair and will often tell you as much about the distance between the meet venue and the team home base as the competitiveness of the club's swimmers. If you want fair competition you absolutely have to have fixed sized teams, as they do at the Olympics or World Championships. You could have a team size of eight and for each event the team gets the points of their swimmer with the highest number of points in that event (i.e. you need team members that can swim a variety of events not eight 50free swimmers). I'm not sure that eight is the right number but this scheme meets all the basic criteria and objections raised about other schemes.
Team competition was debated at length in another thread on
"super teams", you might want to do a search if you are interested.
My pet scheme is to have two classes of team competition, one based on participation like the current system and a second based on small fixed size teams. Participation is a good goal and competition with unlimited numbers is a good thing, but competition based on differing numbers of swimmers is inherently uneven/unfair and will often tell you as much about the distance between the meet venue and the team home base as the competitiveness of the club's swimmers. If you want fair competition you absolutely have to have fixed sized teams, as they do at the Olympics or World Championships. You could have a team size of eight and for each event the team gets the points of their swimmer with the highest number of points in that event (i.e. you need team members that can swim a variety of events not eight 50free swimmers). I'm not sure that eight is the right number but this scheme meets all the basic criteria and objections raised about other schemes.
