Team Scoring at Nationals

It is obvious that the new team scoring rules for National Championships has not achieved the purposes for which it was designed. At 2009 LC Nationals, many relatively small teams were classified as "regional teams" because their LMSC is so small that they all compete together at Nationals (ie., MOVY with 25 members), and many huge teams were not classified as "regional" teams because there were multiple teams in their LMSC (ie., IndySwimfit with 125 members). If the intent of the new rule was to prevent large teams from overpowering small teams in team scoring, the current rule has produced a ridiculous result. I don't know why USMS abandoned the concept of Large Team/Small Team scoring years ago, but this concept would seem to work much more equitably. Some might argue that it is difficult to draw the line between large and small teams, but I think it becomes pretty obvious if you look at the Team Rosters from this year's meet. If the Championship Committee made this determination prior to each Nationals after the entries closed, which is the way they used to do it, if I remember correctly, we would minimize the potential problems with setting an arbitrary immutable limit for all Nationals.
Parents
  • My team had 15 swimmers and finished in the Top 10. I was really happy about that and actually never looked at the different team sizes. Think most all of the California teams were limited in size like we were, because of the travel distance. Even with the relative small size of our National Team, we all had a great time and seem to have grown closer with the experience. Relay day was definitely a part of that process. I love the energy at workouts now as the National Team tells their stories about the INDY trip! Seems many swimmers are already committing to traveling to Atlanta in the Spring and don't want to miss all the excitement :)
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  • My team had 15 swimmers and finished in the Top 10. I was really happy about that and actually never looked at the different team sizes. Think most all of the California teams were limited in size like we were, because of the travel distance. Even with the relative small size of our National Team, we all had a great time and seem to have grown closer with the experience. Relay day was definitely a part of that process. I love the energy at workouts now as the National Team tells their stories about the INDY trip! Seems many swimmers are already committing to traveling to Atlanta in the Spring and don't want to miss all the excitement :)
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