SUPERTEAM changes?

Thanks to Jerry Clark for directing me to this Super Team discussion-so here's my 2 cents. I was one of the Championship Committee members who voted against the rule proposal at last year's convention to change the team scoring at Nationals to a method that just takes the top ten team point scores, regardless of size. This rule did pass, so now size is not a factor in determining team scoring- and as I suspected, people are complaining about this method also. I still maintain that size breakdown is the fairest way to categorize team scoring- whether the team is a Super Team or not should not be a factor. SuperTeams come in all sizes-quite often, a club team may have more members at Nationals than a Super Team does. Just look at Jerry Clark's study of the last 5 years at Nationals and you can see that. The concept of the Super Team is to allow states to combine at Nationals for the purpose of allowing people to swim more relays, allow more social comradery, and yes, to win more points. Our Championship Committee has had many lengthy discussions, with no solution, as to how to designate team categories- this is really impossible to do, as teams are formed in so many different ways throughout the country. I thought our method of breaking down categories according to size was the fairest method- perhaps the problem was in how the breakdown was made. Some valid complaints on past breakdowns were that the breakdown was made at the wrong place- Example: Team A with 20 swimmers was a Medium Team, and Team B with 19 swimmers was a Small Team. I think this is what should be worked on- finding a fair cutoff point for designation of Large, Medium, and Small Teams. It'll be interesting to see what the feedback is from Ft Lauderdale, where all teams will compete on an equal basis for the first 10 spots- this will obviously penalize the smaller teams. LISA WATSON Georgia LMSC Chair

Has LA complained that they have to play in the same league as Miami? Or maybe suggested that Miami not be able to recruit outside Miami city limits? And thus another potentially good idea is consigned to oblivion. :rolleyes: