Yeah, and that was my point. If you look back, I was saying why I think a lot of fast people (a group in which I don't include myself but does comprise a number of my teammates) decided not to go, you know, personally, individually. And I think, honestly, being far from major airports (and thus requiring a transfer or a long drive) was an even bigger deciding factor. I don't love Seattle either, but we went cause it was easy enough to fly into.
And Puerto Rico is a good comparison, as well. What do you think the East/West split on that will be? Does that make the West Coasters who stay home jerks who should put on their very own show? Or only the ones who say out loud they don't want to go because the location is incovenient?
Although that may have been your point, what you wrote was, in my opinion, disrespectful but we'll write it off as miscommunication due to our choice of media for whatever the reason, "pleasant" being the operative word here. My Mama taught me that "if you can't say something nice, shutup". Just kidding...kind of.
I'm just thankful there are groups out there (wherever "there" may be) that are willing to host these events. I may go and I may not. I certainly understand others have their reasons as well for going or not and we'll just leave it as that.
Frankly, I'm surprised. I've only heard great things about Clovis hosting championship swim events.
Perhaps it is the economy more than anything.
It does seem that masters are looking for more than a great event host.
Honestly, I think location is a lot of it. Imagine if Nationals were in Providence (which is actually a much more pleasant city than Fresno--and easier to drive to from major airports). For East Coasters it is a little out of the way, but not so hard to get to. From Oregon or Arizona? It would be a total b*tch. And so almost no East Coasters want to go -- the only person from my team going is from out there and has a wedding the same weekend.
Although that may have been your point, what you wrote was, in my opinion, disrespectful but we'll write it off as miscommunication due to our choice of media for whatever the reason, "pleasant" being the operative word here. My Mama taught me that "if you can't say something nice, shutup". Just kidding...kind of.
I'm just thankful there are groups out there (wherever "there" may be) that are willing to host these events. I may go and I may not. I certainly understand others have their reasons as well for going or not and we'll just leave it as that.
That's funny, my mom once said if you cried every time someone didn't like where you lived, you wouldn't have much time to do anything else. I think she also had choice words about attempting to cow people with trite sayings.
Also, I think we discussed this before, but my impression is that the lack of Northeast nationals has a lot more to do with location requirements than people's unwillingness to put forth effort. I don't think we were able to come up with a pool that had room for two courses and ample warmdown.
About the only facility in the northeast that could think about hosting master's nationals would be Long Island, and I don't think that would be sufficiently large enough for a meet like this. We squeeze about 850 swimmers into our masters meet at Harvard, and that's at the breaking point.
-Rick
What about Buffalo? Admittedly I haven't seen the Buffalo pool in years, but it seemed big enough for Masters Nationals.
From what I understand, the issue with that facility is warm up/warm down space.
I remember Buffalo's diving well being comparable to Federal Way's, but maybe it's smaller. And Federal Way also has three additional lanes in the kiddie pool... yeah I guess that's it.
