2023 Spring Nationals - Irvine - Order of Events

Jim,  How does the championship committee create the order of events?  Just wondering what the process is, years ago I believe there were 3-4 variations and they rotated them each year. 

It's actually a bit more complicated than most folks realize. We have a set of internal rules, more like policies, that we try to adhere to in order to develop an OOE. We won't place 50's (or 100's/200's) back to back, no more than two of the same  distances (50, 100 or 200) on the same day, try to rotate different events before/after the IM's, odd year's men go first, even women go first, odd years start with the 1650, number of competiton lanes definitely affect the likelihood of being able to swim both the 1650 & 1000, blah, blah, blah. 

However, when a host is awarded an event, we ask them if they'd prefer to attempt to develop an order or if they would like the committee to do so. In some instances, such as Greensboro and San Antonio, they requested the order from a prior meet which we accomodated. We look at the after event details such as timeline and comments in post meet surveys and might tweak an event or two. Number of available competition lanes will affect an order or recent meets in the local area. Take for example the order above for Irvine. The committee looked at Riverside 2017, saw that there were no substantial issues and the timeline was favorable so decided to replicate the same OOE. R-side had nine lanes per course and Irvine will have ten per course. The two sites are roughly 35 miles apart so we're expecting many of the same swimmers who swam at R-side and about the same number of total entries. Time will tell.

Brutal order for a distance male.  My best 4 events are within the first 5 events of the meet (1650, 1000, 500, 200 back). Yay me!  See you in Irvine.