I just went to Greensboro for my first USMS nationals. I loved that there were two competition pools to keep things rolling. I'm curious how this will work in Omaha with the single pool. Will the days last longer or do fewer people typically compete in the summer? I realize it's not feasible to have two long course pools together but how will it affect the meet?
There are usually way fewer swimmers at Summer Nationals. Not to say it's a small meet - it's still big and there are tons of people. But not so many that the meet takes twice as long. I only have my subjective experience, but last year's Summer Nationals at Auburn went by pretty quickly. I'm sure there's someone with attendance figures and probably even actual start and end times for each day for recent meets....
Whoa, I've never heard of any of those! That's crazy. Is there any speculation that attendance will be significantly higher this year given the trials connection?
Speculation begins… NOW! For Greensboro I guessed 8675309 entries in the meet. The square root of my guess was still worse than anyone else’s guess. I promised to raise my game for Omaha. Rob Copeland suggested that I guess a Mersenne prime. I thought, wait… could it be…? So it turns out that 8675309 is a prime number, and it is a twin prime, and it is the hypotenuse of a primitive Pythagorean triple, but 2^8675309-1 is not a Mersenne prime. Sigh. That’s still pretty awesome though.
So what can I do to top that? Nothing, right? The age of the universe in seconds is 15^15. Done and done. (Though if you guys want to forget about the caret and act like I just guessed 1515, I would have no problem with that :D)
Additional reading for everyone except James:
divisbyzero.com/.../en.wikipedia.org/.../Mersenne_primehttp://xkcd.com/1047/
Whoa, I've never heard of any of those! That's crazy. Is there any speculation that attendance will be significantly higher this year given the trials connection?
Historically we get ~1700 to attend Spring Nationals and 900-1000 for Summer Nationals. And normally we have two courses for Spring Nationals and one course for Summer Nationals. If Spring Nationals gets twice the number of swimmers but has twice the number of competition lanes (two courses), it is a wash for the timeline. But since the swimmer count is usually more than half for Summer Nationals, the timelines tend to be a little longer for Summer Nationals.
Estimated timelines for most Nationals are available on the USMS website in the Nationals section. You have to look under each meet on the left column for the estimated timeline.
Here are direct links to timelines from recent Summer National meets:
www.usms.org/.../timeline.pdf (2011 Auburn)
www.usms.org/.../timeline.pdf (2010 Puerto Rico)
www.usms.org/.../timeline.pdf (2009 Indy)
www.usms.org/.../timeline.pdf (2008 Portland)
Jeff
Meet attendance at nationals can be found in the USMS Rulebook
www.usms.org/.../appf.pdf
As far as the timeline goes, there is no way to tell how late the sessions will run until after registration closes, which is coming fast. I believe the national office maintains some records of session start and end times.
With Long Course meets there are a couple of ways to speed up the meet, dive-over and chase starts. Dive-overs (starting heat 2 without clearing the pool after hear1) typically save around 20 seconds per heat. Chase starts (starting heat 2 of a 100 from the opposite end of the pool when the training swimmer in heat 1 is around the 75M mark) typically saves around 40 seconds per heat. Omaha may do dive-overs, but they CANNOT do chase starts since the timing cameras are only at one end.
One huge benefit of Omaha will be ample warm-up and warm-down space! And spacious locker rooms!
Another potential time-saver is swim-through heats. Example heat sheet:
Heat 1
Lane 1 - 15:00 seed time
Lane 2 - 4:00 seed time
Lane 3 - 3:45 seed time
Lane 4 - 3:30 seed time
Heat 2
Lane 1 - empty
Lane 2 - 2:45 seed time
Lane 3 - 2:40 seed time
Lane 4 - 2:35 seed time
So swim-through heats allow multiple heats to run while one very slow swimmer does their thing. There were a few of these at Portland in 2008 and they helped keep the meet moving.
Thanks fofr the warning. I clicked on the links, but did not read anything. By a quick glance...it looked boring anyway. :bed:
How many entries will there be at Omaha? Inquiring minds want to know!