How long is a meet?

As for the "first in your heat by 30 seconds," there are people out there who know better and purposely sandbag their times just so they will come in first and look good. This bugs me more than almost anything. I'm sorry, but I don't have time for your (that's the "royal your") ego trip at my swim meet at the expense of (a) my timeline and (b) the egos of everyone else. As much as you may get a thrill out of blowing away the person next to you by 30 seconds... that person may be crushed by being blown away by 30 seconds. Sometimes I'm tempted to re-seed the worst offenders into the middle lane of the fastest heat, so they can be blown away by everyone else in the heat and look foolish themselves. We're going to start doing some time reconciliation for entry times for our biggest meets. We're building up enough data in various times databases to be able to electronically detect bad seed times. If you've gone 1:26, 1:28, and 1:27 in the 100 IM for the past three years, you should not be entered at 1:10, and you should not be entered at 1:50. I'm also thinking about possibly creating some sort of award for either or both of (a) best seed times for an individual and/or (b) best seed times for a team. I.e., for each person, add up the total (absolute value) difference between seed time and actual time, probably do a weighting for distance, and then sort. (I.e., 10 seconds off in the 1650 is a whoooole lot better than 10 seconds off in the 50.) Same for overall seed time differential for a team. We had a handful of people at our latest meet that, over a half-dozen individual events, were a grand total of 0.5 seconds off their seed times. That's phenomenal, and these people deserve trophies in my book. -Rick -Rick

As for the "first in your heat by 30 seconds," there are people out there who know better and purposely sandbag their times just so they will come in first and look good. This bugs me more than almost anything. I'm sorry, but I don't have time for your (that's the "royal your") ego trip at my swim meet at the expense of (a) my timeline and (b) the egos of everyone else. As much as you may get a thrill out of blowing away the person next to you by 30 seconds... that person may be crushed by being blown away by 30 seconds. Sometimes I'm tempted to re-seed the worst offenders into the middle lane of the fastest heat, so they can be blown away by everyone else in the heat and look foolish themselves. We're going to start doing some time reconciliation for entry times for our biggest meets. We're building up enough data in various times databases to be able to electronically detect bad seed times. If you've gone 1:26, 1:28, and 1:27 in the 100 IM for the past three years, you should not be entered at 1:10, and you should not be entered at 1:50. I'm also thinking about possibly creating some sort of award for either or both of (a) best seed times for an individual and/or (b) best seed times for a team. I.e., for each person, add up the total (absolute value) difference between seed time and actual time, probably do a weighting for distance, and then sort. (I.e., 10 seconds off in the 1650 is a whoooole lot better than 10 seconds off in the 50.) Same for overall seed time differential for a team. We had a handful of people at our latest meet that, over a half-dozen individual events, were a grand total of 0.5 seconds off their seed times. That's phenomenal, and these people deserve trophies in my book. -Rick -Rick