Had a great time at SCY Nat's!

Originally posted by NKMD Jim, Darn, I wanted to buy one of your Gospel CD. :-) Your *** events looked good. I did try to get a few words about him when he swam the 200 free since he took over 30 minutes to recover from a 2:00 free. It's hard to get a word in since he took the cordless mic to the blocks when he was swimming and then started commentating right after he was done swimming. Now, that take's talent. He did keep the meet very entertaining. Nadine, how did your meet go? Your times looked pretty good, like you are recovering nicely, good job.:)

I'd like to especially thank the announcer Mark Gill. He was well informed, energetic and funny all at the same time. We should offer him the job of USMS annoucer and get him to all the meets. I'll second the congratulations to Jon Blank. I trained next to him all year. He set his goals, worked hard and it paid off. I know this will embarrass him but he's an example for all of us to follow.

From Big Streamline: $1/minute massage rates ($1.50/min was a bit steep) Hey Mike, The massage "dude" upstairs charged the $1.00/min rate (at least on Friday he was). I didn't hear what the massage "dudette" was charging. Perhaps you were getting hit with a surcharge due to your "Big"ness. Maybe they should consider adding barfbags-to-go after some of the "longer" events. I heard there was not only one needed but a couple of others were required after the 1000 and 1650. It's always fun swimming with the VCM folks. Jim

I don't know what all Scott S., the maseusse, did to me. He REALLY hurt me as he was massaging, but I didn't say anything because I didn't think any damage was being done. However, when I got in the warm up pool the range of motion in my left shoulder was markedly improved! That's the arm I carry kids on normally, and it felt like brand new. I had my best race of the meet after that massage :) I had another appt with him but missed it because of races :( He was AWESOME! I too was only charged $1.00.

I agree - great job by the meet organizers and all of the volunteers last week. The meet seemed to run super smooth and Mark Gill was very entertaining behind the mic. I only identified 3 things that would make future nationals even better: cooler weather (can't control that!!); $1/minute massage rates ($1.50/min was a bit steep); and a return of the small/medium team competition. Why were the small/medium team categories removed in the first place?

Here we go again, Mark. I am planning on going to the convention, will it be decided there?

Originally posted by Karen Duggan I don't know what all Scott S., the maseusse, did to me. I believe a man is a "masseur." A masseuse always refers to a woman.

Jim (Matysek) - Thanks for the info....it sounds like the championship committee has already thought about this issue at length. I agree with everything you said, but it still would be nice to get back to some of the fun small club team battles that our team (VCM) experienced at Indy and AZ. With many of the larger teams now being "state" teams with teammates who don't even train in the same pool/city/state together, it doesn't bode well for the individual clubs and small teams anymore. The relay records are also another subject with these combined teams, but in the end it's probably better for Masters swimming since it's attracting more swimmers (via recruitment) who may otherwise chose not to compete. I guess if our team wants to jump back into the team competition, we'll have to get bigger and/or join an area/state team. FYI - I thought about the team ranking issue during the meet, and was initially thinking about tossing out an idea for a new team scoring proposal where the current scoring system would be used along with a "swimmer-weighted" team score (total score divided by the # of swimmers). I was thinking that the team rankings would then be compiled by the sum of their two rankings (i.e., CMS = 1 (total score ranking) + 20? (swimmer-weighted ranking) = 21, while TOC = 4 + 1? = 5, and so forth). The team with the lowest score would be the champion. Interestingly enough, I scored a few of the top 10 teams from last week using this approach, and found that TOC would probably rank first due to their extremely high "swimmer-weighted" scores (men, women & combined were all well above 30, while CMS and many other large teams were in the 15-25 range). A problem with this approach is that it might drive teams to select "elite-only" members n order to increase their swimmer-weighted score. Well it's just an idea.....I'll keep thinking.....it brings up ideas of college football's BCS system. By the way, Mark really talked up a storm during your races....payback may be necessary.

Jim (Clemmons) - It's always fun to swim with you too. You had an awesome meet, keep it up. Nice comments about "Big"ness and barf bags...loved those. I'd like to point out that a few ISHOF 5-gallon buckets of water also work well in cleaning up post-1650 distress episodes. On the issue of $1.50/min, that was the rate on Thursday. I didn't go back after that cause I needed to save money for my post-meet beer fund. Maybe there was a revolt and the massage gang lowered their prices on Friday.

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.