on deck check in

Originally posted by mbmg3282 If an efficient meet is what we are after, we should seed only by time. :D :D :D And I understand your analysis of the announcer thing. I have not been to a long course nationals so I didn't know how it was conducted. It seems we might be at an impasse. Our wise Mark Gill has shown us that it really doesn't cut down the time. And I guess some of us will have to deal with it. I don't want to have frazzled administrators who work 16-hour days in the heat of an outdoor meet to make the meet end the next day 20 minutes earlier (though anyone who was in Tempe on Saturday night in 2003 knows that 20 minutes would have gotten us out of there before sunset). I defer to the administrators of the meets to make the best choices. I'll just show up and promise to be in my lane when my heat is called.

Originally posted by dorothyrde For age group meets, we do positive check in up until 45 minutes before meet starts. Then it is a rush and flurry and stressful time to get everything scratched seeded and printed. And yes, it does not prevent empty lanes all together, but it stops many of them. I don't see the admin people staying late, this is a before the meet process unless you close checkin the night before like age group championships. Well, wheter you see it or not, I was one of those admin people staying up late, just dealing with deck entered relays and protests, getting the results out, data entered, heat sheets printed out and posted for the next day. The days were ending between 3 and 6 PM, and administration, volunteers and the cleanup crew were leaving the pool 4 hours after that, and coming to the pool about an hour before everyone. Admin days ran from 5AM till 11PM every day. That's without deck seeding the 50's, 100's and 200's. I don't see how one could take a tally of everyone (few hundred people) entered (checked in for) a 50 free (for example) and not hold up the meet if you don't close the check in the night before. Especially if that happens to be the first event. Sure, you could have more people doing the data entry, but you still have to take time on the QC. As for the checking in, people get confused with just one check-in deadline per day, can you imagine the confusion if you told people that the check in for each event closes two hours priror to that event??? Then you have to allow some time to clear problems and protests... there's always those. Also, I worked or sectional and JO meets which are pretty big in with respect to the swimmer count. You don't get 30, 40 or 50 heats of one event, like you do in masters. It's a different animal. I remember Indy last year, I think there was 90+ heats of just men's free. That's 90*8 people... That's 720 names that one has to make sure are checked in. Even if it takes you half a second per swimmer to check them in or scratch them, that takes some time.

Typically, we find at nationals there is a high incedent of no shows as it gets closer to flight times. The 200 free on Sunday at Mission Viejo is an example of this. A few thoughts on totally deck seeding a meet versus particially deck seeding. If we require swimmers to check in one hour before the race (as we have done in the past), it would eliminate most of the empty lanes. However, there are some tradeoffs. You will not give the first heats much warm up time. We found they typically only had a few minutes from the time we were able to post the seedings to when they swam. Also, you don't know where people are swimming. For many of us, swimming is part competitive, part social. So, at the 2003 nationals in Tempe, we tried a compromise. Check-in for all events the day before. This allowed us time to seed the meet in a less hurried fashion than one hour before. It did require the admin staff to stay late. At the 2003 meet, we typically didn't leave before 9:00 pm. That was tough when we also arrived at 5:00 am each day. The advantages - it gave us heat sheets. The disadvantages - there were more no shows than if we did it the day of. Also, if you missed signing in, you were out for the entire day, not just one event. After studying the data for a while, we discovered that we saved about 10% by deck seeding an event. Wow, that is a lot. Maybe. The 50's take about a half an hour. So we saved 3 minutes for each of those that we deck seeded. That got us thinking that maybe deck seeding wasn't necessary for all events. The last few nationals have not been so big that we needed every minute of time savings that we could get. So, we tried deck seeding only the distance races. The advantages - simplier process for swimmers. It is also much easier on the admin staff. Now we only have to seed one event each day. We are not staying until 9:00 pm anymore. If a swimmer misses checking in, they may still get to swim some on that day. The disadvantages - there are more empty lanes. The meet may run a few minutes longer. Why deck seeding doesn't always speed meets up? It does remove empty lanes in the middle of the pool. However, if there are 8 swimmers in an age group and 2 don't check in, we still swim the heat, now there are just 6 swimmers in it. Because we seed by age group, removing no shows does not mean we gain time in all cases. Only if the heat drops under 4 swimmers would it matter. If an efficient meet is what we are after, we should seed only by time. Better yet, we should seed by time and mix the genders. We currently only do that in distance events. However, nationals is a complex system of tradeoffs. We like to swim by age group when feasable, so we accept an less efficient meet for the opportunity. We also want to meet to be user friendly. Thus we don't deck seed everything and we provide heat sheets. The championship committee tries to balance all of the different desires to create a competitive and fun meet.

Originally posted by Conniekat8 Well, wheter you see it or not, I was one of those admin people staying up late, just dealing with deck entered relays and protests, getting the results out, data entered, heat sheets printed out and posted for the next day. The days were ending between 3 and 6 PM, and administration, volunteers and the cleanup crew were leaving the pool 4 hours after that, and coming to the pool about an hour before everyone. Admin days ran from 5AM till 11PM every day. That's without deck seeding the 50's, 100's and 200's. I don't see how one could take a tally of everyone (few hundred people) entered (checked in for) a 50 free (for example) and not hold up the meet if you don't close the check in the night before. Especially if that happens to be the first event. Sure, you could have more people doing the data entry, but you still have to take time on the QC. As for the checking in, people get confused with just one check-in deadline per day, can you imagine the confusion if you told people that the check in for each event closes two hours priror to that event??? Then you have to allow some time to clear problems and protests... there's always those. Also, I worked or sectional and JO meets which are pretty big in with respect to the swimmer count. You don't get 30, 40 or 50 heats of one event, like you do in masters. It's a different animal. I remember Indy last year, I think there was 90+ heats of just men's free. That's 90*8 people... That's 720 names that one has to make sure are checked in. Even if it takes you half a second per swimmer to check them in or scratch them, that takes some time. No, the whole session closes 45 minutes prior to the meet start. We put out checkin sheets that list the names of the swimmers and their events, and they circle their names and the events they will be swimming. Then you go through and scratch and seed prior to the meet starting. I have been setting up and adminning meets for 10 years, and this is how we have always done it. This summer, to try to take some of the stress off of getting the big meet started, we preseeded the first 2 events of each session. I asked for scratches the day before, by a certain time. Now with championship meets, it is always run preseeded, with scratches due the night before at a predetermined time, and all the meet is seeded the night before after the scratches. Also, these are age group meets, and I think that it is a different flavor to run. They have a coach telling them to be there at a certain time, and all the swimmers arrive usually on time. With Masters, there is a little more.....coming and going. Connie, one more edit. I did not mean to critisize how it was done, I did not even go. Most comments of the meet were very favorable, so I would say you all did a very good job running the meet. Just like the conversation of seeding by age or seeding by time, there are good arguements on both sides, and no true correct way.

Get a world-class announcer and have him or her announce the swimmers before each heat. Do it in the time it takes the previous heat's swimmers to get out of the pool. The timeline implications of this suggestion would actually slow the meet down more than not deck seeding does. Consider we have several hundred heats that take place each day. If you only spent 20 seconds reading off the 8 names clearly so those without heat sheets knew who was stepping up, you would add over 1.5 hours to the meet. At our LC Nationals, we use dive over starts. The heat is called up to the blocks while the heat in the water is finishing. As soon as the last person touches, the starter begins the sequence of commands to start the race. Only after the swimmers are off the blocks do the athletes in the just finished heat exit the water. At SC Nationals, we do not use dive over starts, but the start is calling the swimmers up on the blocks as the athletes finish and exit. Once the start blows the first series of whistles all the announce can do is give the heat number.

Phil, I am that person you hand those check in sheets to that magically give you the printed heat sheet! It is a highly stressful 45 minutes, and takes all of my concentration to make sure I do it correctly(while 10 people are trying to ask me questions, I actually post people around me to field them so I can get it done!). For a meet as large as this, it would definately take longer than 45, but if you could also have a pre-positive check in for people who know say the week before, that cuts down on the time also. This last summer meet, I let coaches know we would be preseeding the 400 Im on Friday night and if they knew of swimmers that would not be there, let me know by 9pm Thursday. They were very co-operative, and not only let me know those scratches, but others as well, which made each day a little easier. I think that age group is easier because there is a central person(the coach), per team as a contact. Masters would be harder because it is more each to his/her own.

Yep, and I am searching for that right person to take my place as my kids are growing up and out of the program. I have several trained, and one young lady I had to throw onto the hot coals last summer because I had to leave to coach my softball team! She did fine, and that was encouraging because she has young kids and should be around for awhile.

Cjquill, I'm not sure what lack of shade you're referring to at MV? There was A LOT of shade and those bleachers were not full- you could have sat there. As far as the deck seeding at Pacific meets- the heats and lanes are posted well ahead of time at about 4 different "high traffic" areas around the pool. Again, you don't have your own heat sheets, but do you need one? At our meets, again, there is a program and if you're so inclined you could write in the heats and lanes of all of the swimmers! No shows and scratching penalty- this was how it was done when I was an age-grouper. I don't like it for masters. There are way TOO many things that come up. I frequently have someone check me in when I'm not in the first distance events and so far I've NEVER missed my event, but I know people who have had real life emergencies and were able to swim their next event. Plus, I'd be really miffed if I drove a long way, had a rotten trip, I was late (whatever happened) and THEN on top of it I couldn't swim my next race! Remember Masters is supposed to be as inclusive as possible :p

Jeff, Your ideas are good. It helps to hear different perspectives before we argue things out in championship committee meetings and present proposed changes at the annual convention. One idea that occurred to me reading this thread is that if we could scratch swimmers that haven't gone through the arrival registration or checked-in for an event online, we could prevent a large number of no-shows. Typically, each national championship has 10% of the people enter the meet and never show up. If we could determine who these people are and remove them before running heat sheets, we could gain a great savings and come closer to meeting the goals of a number of the ideas posted here. Of course, this is probably not that easy to implement and would require creating heat sheets during the middle of the night. Still, something to think about.

I have talked to several meet administers who all agree that on-deck check in is worth whatever extra effort is involved, so I do not buy the too much work or too much extra time argument. I have helped at several USS meets (I was the person who collected the check in sheets, marked the ones scratched, passed in on to the person at the computer, and posted the heat sheets in the highly trafficked areas) and seen it work first hand. A person removes the names not checked and prints the sheets -- voila! finished before the event and no late nights. Perhaps they used a different system at MV. But time saving is not a major driver for me, though I do not look forward to an international meet where the 50 events take considerably more than half an hour. I just want a better meet, and I hope that my desire for full heats (as full as practical -- the argument that there will always be empty lanes is true but irrelevant) is not perceived as more selfish than the desire of some swimmers to not be inconvenienced by checking in to events once a day. I am not a big fan of heat sheets in my hand during the meet -- it seems like a waste of trees, to me. I ask my friends when they are swimming or look for their names in the posted sheets. As for those elderly who have problems with that, I don't see why heat sheets would help (we have a memory problem, right?), and that is what coaches, friends, family, and teammates are for. I watched a 360+ relay team make their relay events no problem, and there were no before the day heat sheets for those events. (by the way, when do you think the first 400+ relay will occur?)