Fast Pools

There are definitly some pools which have an advantage over others. At the Texas Age group open I had several of my swimmers compete there. The pool is the Texas Aquatics Center at the University of Texas, Austin Campus. IT is a multimillion dollar state of the art pool. It is an indoor 50, but it has a bulkhead in the ceiling. when it comes down it makes the pool into the worlds fastest 50 yard pool. It is the fastest because the newly created wall is only 4 feet high, under that is 5 feet of open water to the bottom of the 9'uniform depth pool. this causes the wake to not come back on any of the swimmers. Also the starting block are on raised platforms which make the deck at the permanant wall also flow through. State of the Art lane lines are used and the pool is absolutely amazing. If anyone out there ever has a chance to check out this amazing pool I greatly encouarge you to check it out K. Robert Burkey :)

There certainly are pools faster than others. Just think back to the days (if you are old enough) when lane separators were thin ropes held afloat by cork rings spaced out every 4 feet or so. There have been many improvements since that time such as those mentioned in this thread. However, even today, in our neck of the woods, you can still swim in short course pools with 6 narrow lanes that are barely deep enough to flip turn in the shallow end and have no gutters at the ends. Races in these pools (especially fly) remind me of swimming in the sea during the surfing days of my youth. Anyway, enough digression, my question is: was the Cleveland SU pool fast? (faster than Federal Way?) Prior to the Nationals someone reported the pool to be 'mythically fast' in its short course configuration. There were good times at the pool but were there any mythical ones? Ian.

It was Bellflower. They use to have novice meets there in the late 1960's and early 1970.s. You would earn points and win a throphy worth so many points. I had to swim 66 2/3 races as a 12 year old there.

33 1/3? Was that the old Santa Monica Municipal Pool? I remember it being something like that. Originally posted by cinc310 Back in the 1970's the pools were made less deep because we all had flat dives and we didn't do more than two kicks of dolphin for the butterfly and backstokers flipped on their backs and did flatter kicks. I still prefer the East Los Angeles pool over Belmont Shores. I was surprise to find that the CIF meet in high school went back to Long Beach which is an older pool than East Los Angeles. I swam in even a 33 1/3 pool which they don't create anymore, when I was in a novice summer league back in 1969 at 12 years old, and it had some strange lane lines.

You got your fast pools, you got your slow pools..... Circa 1970, Nyack, NY, YWCA pool, High school meet... 20 yards. Three lanes. But divided into four lanes with those rope/cork float lane lines. Water temp 90+ degrees F. NO GUTTERS. No BLOCKS. Yikes. I swam a 400 free. Thought I was gonna die from the heat. What a toilet. Pool design counts.

I swam in a 20 yard pool and workout at a health club now probably between 15 to 20 yards. Anyway, the pool I swam as a kid in Tustin for a novice meet was a little on the warm side and I did 40 yard swims and 80 yard swims. I did pretty well at that meet. The first pool I swamwith electronic timing pads was Mission Viejo in some age group meet before that ,they had those old wand up watches and some small electronical hand watches. That dates me with a lot of other people that write here.