I'm guilty of it. I imagine we're all guilty of it: seeing a meet announcement and seeing our favorite two events back to back, or four events we want to swim on one day and then only 1 then next day. We get irritated and wonder why the meet director couldn't have designed this to better suit our needs? We moan at workout, whine on the forums, ***** on our blogs, etc. I'd like to encourage my fellow forumites to join me in taking a pledge:
I hereby pledge to:
just be grateful that there are volunteers, teams and facilities willing to host Masters meets,
recognize that no matter how hard these dedicated volunteers try, they'll never be able to create the order of events that satisfies all Masters swimmer,
recognize that, even if I can't swim those two favorite events in this meet because they are back to back (or whatever my complaint is), I've got a multi-decade Masters career ahead of me in which to swim them at different meets,
to, therefore, stop whining/moaning about the order of events, and
look at a different order of events as an opportunity to branch out and try new events!
Signed,
Patrick "Indebted to Masters Meet Directors/Officials/Volunteers" Brundage
A simple rule of thumb is to ask:
What percentage of the swimmers might want to double various events
I'm sure this information could be gleaned from past Nationals entries. You could come up with a matrix with all the events along each axis and then a number in each cell indicating what percentage of swimmers who swam X event also swam Y event. To do this correctly you'd need the results from several meets, because the order of events will influence event selection for a single meet.
A simple rule of thumb is to ask:
What percentage of the swimmers might want to double various events
I'm sure this information could be gleaned from past Nationals entries. You could come up with a matrix with all the events along each axis and then a number in each cell indicating what percentage of swimmers who swam X event also swam Y event. To do this correctly you'd need the results from several meets, because the order of events will influence event selection for a single meet.
