Seeding - Seed Time vs Actual Time

I guess another corollary to this is why does USMS seed distance events slow-to-fast? All the USA Swimming meets I go to seed them fast-to-slow. If the events were seeded like this I bet the sandbagging problem would be greatly reduced. There was a time at Nationals when some distance events were seeded fast to slow (regardless of age). And some "fast" swimmers would put down a slow seed time so they could have the benefit of seeing what the fastest people did in their age group so they would know what it took to win before they dove in. At a local meet we seeded the 800 free fast to slow as the last event of the meet. Some swimmers put down faster times just so they could try to be in the first heat so they didn't have to wait around. It's impossible to please everybody and have a perfect system unless we automatically used seed times for all based on times in a database. But of course that isn't practical in masters plus what do you do if you haven't done that event before. All we can do is ask people to follow the definition in the rule book for seed times: "...(times) having been previously achieved or reasonably estimated". But some adults will choose not to follow that either so what can you do? Can't shoot em so might as well accept their entry fees. :D

I guess another corollary to this is why does USMS seed distance events slow-to-fast? All the USA Swimming meets I go to seed them fast-to-slow. If the events were seeded like this I bet the sandbagging problem would be greatly reduced. There was a time at Nationals when some distance events were seeded fast to slow (regardless of age). And some "fast" swimmers would put down a slow seed time so they could have the benefit of seeing what the fastest people did in their age group so they would know what it took to win before they dove in. At a local meet we seeded the 800 free fast to slow as the last event of the meet. Some swimmers put down faster times just so they could try to be in the first heat so they didn't have to wait around. It's impossible to please everybody and have a perfect system unless we automatically used seed times for all based on times in a database. But of course that isn't practical in masters plus what do you do if you haven't done that event before. All we can do is ask people to follow the definition in the rule book for seed times: "...(times) having been previously achieved or reasonably estimated". But some adults will choose not to follow that either so what can you do? Can't shoot em so might as well accept their entry fees. :D